Does love have to hurt

Love does not have to hurt but it often seems to. When you listen to the music of love you will hear it telling stories about the pain and sorrow of unfulfilled love. Someone left, someone cheated, or someone died and left someone sad and alone. Love is such a strong positive emotion that it is inevitable that there will be some pain associated with it at some time. This is Nature’s law of opposites. For every force there is an equal and opposite force to hold it in balance. As much as our love would soar as a bird on the air, there is gravity to bring it back to earth…sometimes falling but usually gliding.

Passion, is a bird on wing in the thin air of the highest sky without a net. Passion is blissful delight. It’s exciting, thrilling, and we feel so alive. You remember your first love and you always will while those that follow diminish in the distance and fade in the past.

First love and passion unlock so many feelings that it’s hard to describe them all: euphoria, peace, tenderness, tingling, jealousies, and complete connection are but a few. Passion is a sweet anesthesia that blinds us to anything that might come between us. Love, in the passion stage, holds a power for that moment that can overcome everything.

When judgment is replaced with passion, people tend to make different decisions than they otherwise would. You dated and maybe even married that person even though you sensed that there were major differences between you. You somehow thought that they weren’t important or that they would change. Then you realized, when the passion wore off as it always does, that maybe things weren’t as great as you thought. That realization and the following break-up were hard. It hurt. It seems as though love always hurts.

The truth, however, is that love does not hurt but it is the falling out of love or not having love that really hurts. And the higher you are, such as in the heights of passion or the tower of a long-term love, the harder the fall. A break-up, divorce, death, or abandonment are some of the most painful experiences of life because we miss our love so much.

We all need two things in life 1. To not be alone or feel alone, and 2. To be appreciated and loved for whom we are. Love brings us together and loneliness reminds us that we are missing something in life. You may not even understand it but the forces are there. We seek fulfillment in the love of others when we often need to love ourselves just as much.

“Love is the passionate and abiding desire on the part of two or more people to produce together conditions under which each can be, and spontaneously express, his real self: to produce together an intellectual soil and an emotional climate in which each can flourish,far superior to what either could achieve alone.”

From “Apples of Gold” – un-attributed quote