If You Resist Love Because You Fear Getting Hurt, Read This

I’ve been thinking a lot about the endless whirlwind that is love and how everyone says that love is not supposed to hurt. How can we say that?

Let me preface this by saying love shouldn’t hurt in specific circumstances that involve physical or emotional abuse. However, love coincides with hurt as life does with death. They go hand and hand, and nothing is ever linear. As they walk together, they can derail in one simple step and crash into the other, as if they are two trains colliding and causing a catastrophic disruption in everything they touch. You cannot love so deeply without accepting the prospect of grieving that same love. To truly devote yourself to such raw emotion and to truly feel all of the intense and passionate emotions that come with it, you have to be okay with the grief.

As the sun rises in the morning, we’re aware that it will set again and darkness will settle in around us, only illuminated by the moon above. The beauty of the sun does not devalue the beauty of the moon, they just glimmer differently. The beautiful part of this analogy is that the moon’s glow is a reflection of the sun’s light, just as love is the origin of the deep pain you may feel when it slowly sets across your own sky. What we don’t realize is that pain can be beautiful too, as pain is the reflection of how much love we felt at one point in time.

What if we think of this dreadful emotion as a plow, loosening the ground below so that the new may grow? What if we experience pain as a way to grow, to blossom, into a new and equally beautiful form of ourselves? The lessons from our sunny love and moonlit pain guides us through each phase that follows. We dread suffering so much because it is suffocating at times. It feels as though you fall from breathing the purest oxygen to choking on smoke as the fire burns around you, and those moments where the smoke burns your lungs are petrifying. Still, as you venture to find a way out of your smoldering surroundings, you yearn deeply to find fresh air. The aspiration to reach the air that will soothe the burning inside you drives you to keep going, and the moment you breathe in and are met with pure oxygen again, you feel as though you reached a miraculous beginning. The smoke will linger in your lungs, and at times it will cause sharp pain when you breathe in and out. Nevertheless, you are still breathing and healing with each passing moment.

We cannot be reluctant to love due to the fear of loss, as they walk together, hand in hand.