Does Love Really Hurts?

To understand why love hurts, first of all we have to understand what love really is? If asked, most of us will tell that love is the most wonderful feeling they have gone through, but since I am a science student I have a different understanding of love. For me love is an emotional response due to triggering of neurotransmitters in the brain and the release of neuromodulators, such as oxytocin. Love is a perception, a judgment, an evaluation. Ok now let us find out when we can say that we are in love.

Love is when you like calling your name by the other person. Love is what makes you smile when you are tired. Love is when you tell someone you like his/her dress, and then he/she wears it every day. Love is when your wife gives you the best chicken piece. Love is waking up next to the person every morning with a huge smile on your face. Love is when you disturb your sleep every morning before sunrise just to close the curtain so that the sun rays don’t disturb your partner’s sleeps. Love is happily going to the cricket game with your husband, that awful chick flick with your girlfriend. Love is listening to the stupid stories of your wife after coming from office even thou you are tired. Love is eating your food happily even thou your wife forgot to put salt in it. Experiencing love is out of this world, it is one of those perfect emotions which changes the way a person lives, am I right? 

But my friends, for most of us falling in love has not made us experience all these things. For the larger population love is like a whirlpool which attracts all the things towards it and destroys its existence. Reason behind this is very simple, when we depend on others for something (it could be physically, mentally or emotionally), in long run it hurts, because like the other resources on the earth which are limited and gets exhausted after sometime, in the same way we also get the limited stock of happiness or love from others and when it gets exhausted after sometime it becomes the cause for our pain. Many people say, and even I also believed in the past that “love hurts”. In reality it is not the love which hurts, it the over expectation from an unknown person which hurts. When someone falls in love, it is the happiness of being with that person which makes him/her feel special. So it is natural that if emotionally we will be dependent on someone for happiness then after the rosy days it becomes the reason for our pain. So you should love yourself, love the things you do, love your presence because it is you who spends maximum time with you. It is you who knows yourself better than others. Enjoy life as a single person, like a healthy plant in a pot where no one else shares the nutrients present in the pot. Unless we love our self, we cannot expect anyone else to love us.

Love hurts because we choose for it to hurt. We allow ourselves to develop attachment with people, under the assumption that they will always be there for us. Love hurts because we surrender ourselves to it. Love hurts when its foundation is week, when trust is betrayed, when there is no respect from the other person and eventually it is lost. As love is natural and comes suddenly in our life, same happens with the pain. None of us are prepared for it and we don’t want it to happen so it hurts. Love creates a beautiful imaginary world in the heart and mind where it dwells enveloped with protective caring of the opposite sex. Love hurts when the beautiful imaginary world is destroyed because he/she walks away of your life bowing to some unavoidable circumstances from the society.

It is not that love always hurts, there are a number of people who can indulge in hours of argument favoring that love never hurts. Just think in the other way, someone walks into your lonely life, changes your world, and makes you a better person and walks away. Why can’t we just accept that? I can bet, that most of you who have experienced true love must have changed your bad habits, then let us treat that person as a doctor. Instead of cursing that person, you should be grateful to him/her for making you a better person. In the same time I agree that heartbreak is the most undesirable experience which we never want to come across, I also believe that all the people are good, intentionally they will not hurt anyone just for time pass. It is the situations that force us to part away from each other. 

All of us are surrounded with lots of friends and family members who will really not thing once before giving you their helping hands, who will love to hug you in your gloomy times, who will be delighted to share your happiness and sorrow. Then why should we get depressed over the loss of one person who really doesn’t care for you? Someone had beautifully said “a bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn”. We simply cannot avoid getting hurt, but as the saying goes, ‘it is better to love than to have never loved at all’. Whatever happens it happen for the best. If you loved a person then in return don’t expect the same from the other just think that he doesn’t deserve your caring and move on. Like in our childhood days our dad would say that we would not learn cycling unless we will try for it and get hurt in the same way we will not learn how to love unless we will get the pain. The lucky people who live happily with their loved ones say that they “fell in love” because we don’t force our self to be loved we just fall into it. So my friends don’t find love, let love find you. We lose our love, only when we are destined to find someone else who can love us even more that we love ourselves.