A friend recently posted, "If love is so nice... tell me why it hurts so bad." I wrote a response about what love really is and why it hurts, and I felt it pertinent to share it today.
Why does love hurt?
Because love puts others before your own interests, no matter the cost: "If it hurts me, but is beneficial to you, then so be it."
Because loving someone is valuing them equal to or greater than yourself. Their success becomes your success, their joy your joy, and their pain becomes your own.
Loving someone means they become a part of your heart: Anything that is less than the same returned is tantamount to being rejected by a part of yourself. But they are a part of you, and that will forever be the case, regardless of circumstances, feelings, or reciprocation.
But failure to love is so much worse. It is solitude, it is rejection, isolation, alienation, destruction. To choose not to love someone for fear of pain is to deny oneself of the intense joy of seeing another fulfilled and you yourself fulfilling them (and that is not to mention what you might receive in return).
Love hurts- love KILLS- because it is honest vulnerability, and it inevitably invites pain into the most vulnerable parts of our being. But how beautiful, how amazing is it when that tender core is met with tenderness in return, is touched with the grace and care it so freely offers? Love is dangerous, and painful, but it is worth so much more than anything the pain might take away.
