Love can Hurt at Times, but it is not Always Bad for Us

^{Photo by Ron Lach}

Love is a mysterious thing. It compels us to be better. It helps us become more caring, kinder, and more understanding of ourselves and others. Love obliges us to open our hearts. However, love can hurt at times too.

Raymond Quattlebaum is well-versed in this type of pain, authoring “The Color of Love.” Pain sounds contradictory to what we perceive as love but is a regular part of it. It’s time to put our romanticization aside about love and look at what it is.

Love and Fighting: Is it Normal for Couples to Fight?

“Fighting” is a word with too much weight in this context. Fighting means having an innate desire to win — regardless of how the victory is achieved. This word means that two or more parties are coming at each other at the expense of one another.

While it’s true that love can hurt at times, fighting is not normal, but conflict certainly is. Conflict arises when individuals in a relationship do not like how their partner treats them. This state can then be solved by addressing the dispute and making compromises.

Every couple experiences conflict. Some have it happening more frequently than others, but disagreements are inevitable regardless if the relationship is good or bad. You are still, after all, individuals who are constantly working on being one with each other.

However, if fighting (not getting into conflicts and addressing them) has become abusive (verbally or physically), it might be time to reconsider the relationship. And if the main reason why you’re fighting is that both of you can’t see eye to eye, then that means you might be too different from each other. One of the nine basic rules to find love says, “Beware of the ‘opposites attract’ theory.” While opposites attract initially, your differences could cause serious friction as the months or years pass.

Love and Pain: Love can Hurt at Times, Even in Healthy Relationships

Most of us agree that spotting a toxic relationship is more straightforward than pointing out a healthy one. The big warning signs are there for everyone to see, even if it’s something you don’t experience in your relationship. But what exactly is considered a “healthy relationship”? Is it the lack of conflict? Is it the lack of tears?

It turns out that none of these things are signs that a relationship is healthy. Happy couples still do get into conflicts with each other. They still cry and get hurt when arguments happen. They could feel unappreciated, neglected, or unloved because their partners are sometimes oblivious to their feelings.

Does that mean they’re in a “bad relationship”? Of course not. More often than not, life gets between the person we love and us. Work, prior commitments, dreams, passions, all of these things are what occupy our lives at specific points. Accepting that these things can affect our relationship and then finding a way to keep “the love” in the middle is a healthy approach to resolving conflicts that arise from these factors.

Fortunately, love can help stitch together whatever tear in the relationship you and your partner have. As Raymond Quattlebaum said about love’s healing and transformative power, “Love is an extremely powerful thing. It is vigorous enough to cause healing and transformation even in the most difficult times, among the most difficult people.”

Reasons Why Love Hurts in Relationships

You’d be surprised at the various reasons why love can hurt at times, and we’ve listed some of them below:

• Being Disillusioned – When we are in love, we often have assumptions about our partners, only to be disillusioned by who they are. It’s best to keep our expectations at a minimum and not to put our love interests on a pedestal.

• A Future that is Not Promised – Humans fear what is uncertain, and we also reflect that in our relationships. Our fear of an unclear future where our current partners are no longer with us frightens us so much we feel our hearts physically cracking inside our chests.

• Crashing After the Chemicals Fade – Being in love is a nice feeling that fills us with oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin — chemicals our body produces when we’re happy. But once they fade away, we enter a state similar to withdrawal, causing great pain when separated from our partners.

Loving can indeed hurt sometimes. It’s the very first line of Ed Sheeran’s “Photograph.” But with love comes excellent blessing. With love comes growth, and growth can genuinely be painful. But as Raymond Quattlebaum and Ed Sheeran have realized, love is “The only thing that makes us feel alive,” making the pain that comes with it worth it.