Love hurts, and it's okay
It was his birthday, and his friends were throwing him a surprise party. I’d been invited too. There were 20-30 people by the time I went there and someone had brought in a cake. Chocolate cake, I think. He blew the candles, and we were all singing “Happy Birthday”. He seemed so happy. I was happy seeing him happy.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. My eyes started to trace his full face, and then just by chance, I happened to see something on his neck. I think it’s what people call a hickie. I wasn’t too sure. But I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. The smile on my face faded. I don’t exactly remember what I felt, but I didn’t want to be there anymore. He ran behind me to check on why I was really leaving. I couldn’t stop myself, so I blurted.
“What is that on your neck?”
“Oh that! I cut myself while shaving”
“That doesn’t look like a cut.”
“Come on, don’t be crazy now. Of course it’s a cut.”
“Okay, I’m late, I better get home. I’ll see you later.”
I kept replaying the whole scene in my head over and over again, trying to make sense of it. We’d barely been going out a month, so may be I was imagining things. He kept calling me all evening, but I didn’t answer his calls.
I think he knew that I knew.
I needed to think, alone. The next day, I finally answered his call. He pretended like nothing had happened. May be he hoped I didn’t know. But I needed answers, and so I blurted.
“That thing on your neck I saw yesterday wasn’t a cut, was it?”
“Sigh, no, it wasn’t.”
I didn’t want to know anymore, but I also kind of did.
“So what the hell was that?”
“I didn’t want you to find out like this. I meant nothing. I was helpless, my ex simply wouldn’t let go and accept that I’ve moved on. She came over, and forced herself on me. I was helpless. I’m sorry.”
I hung up. I could hear no more. I could only feel the warm tears rush down my cheeks, that just wouldn’t stop. I was screaming in my head. I wanted to really scream out loud. I was angry. I was upset. I felt relieved. I was in absolute disbelief. I was feeling so many things all at once, that I don’t think I could tell apart the various emotions I felt in that very moment.
I felt destroyed. I felt sick for feeling weak. I wanted to do anything to stop the stench of my weakness. So, I started to wipe my tears, told myself that I couldn’t let anyone affect me this much, and got busy trying to pretend like none of this ever happened.
I channelled all of the pent up negative energy into studying (no surprises there, huh?). As luck may have it, I even ended up acing my exams that year. Finally, “taking refuge in good marks”, I never had to really deal with my disgusting feelings.
As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, I’ve set out on a journey to understand love when it is born and the journey it takes us on.
I’ve been speaking to lots of people in the 15-25 age group and I can’t tell you how nourishing this last one week has been. I’ve learnt way too many things that I haven’t had a chance to fully process, but I’ll tell you that one thing hit too close to home.
Too often, love hurts, and we never quite grieve the pain. Instead, we’re too busy trying to pick ourselves up and run so nobody sees us, so we can eventually pretend like we never fell.
While this happened most often to people who were betrayed, I realised that the necessary condition to be hurt in love was actually just realising that you are contributing more to the relationship than your partner.
Strange isn’t it?
Isn’t love supposed to be unconditional and all that?
So, if it ain’t unconditional, is it even love?
When you’re in love, whether you are betrayed, rejected, ghosted or your relationship slowly fizzled out over time, all of it causes the same grand variety of pain or anxiety. Let’s explore this pain at t=0 and at some random point t in the future.
At t=0, you are in disbelief. You think it’ll go away if you slept and woke up, just like a bad dream. Being betrayed on or not being loved back anymore absolutely sucks balls.
Your trust is broken beyond repair. You are taken for granted. Your partner assumes you are stupid enough to not notice. When this hits you, the feeling manifests into anger and lingers on for a very very long time. But who you are angry with, isn’t entirely clear.
You feel helpless, because you can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why this happened to you. You start retracing your path from the very beginning to “the moment” it all starts to crumble.
You feel powerless because you’ve no control over what happened. In a desperate attempt to get some sense of control, you start to blame yourself.
You think you are feeling slightly better, except, it actually feels much worse. You don’t want to go back to your partner to ask because then you’ll have to admit to the emotions they are able to kindle in you.
You want to somehow feel powerful, so you tell yourself that you’re not in a position to hear anyone out and you don’t need any answers. But then that doesn’t last very long. You want answers, so you decide to confront your partner.
You hope that they’ll “melt” and help restore the balance in your relationship by contributing more to the relationship than you going forward. Except, in most cases, this doesn’t happen.
Even if it did, how much effort is really enough to restore the trust, or the balance in your relationship? If you’re lucky, at best they’ll want to explain themselves and possibly even apologise for breaking your trust. But does it really matter?
You lose a part of your ability to trust forever. You don’t think you are worth being loved. Some people go about seeking external validation of their self-worth. Some people indulge in vengeance, but sadly, it never fixes anything sustainably.
Some others distract themselves with non-romantic pursuits, which appears to help temporarily, but in reality, that’s just running away from dealing with your feelings head on.
Eventually, before you can forgive your partner, or yourself, you sometimes end up forgetting what actually happened in turn helping you pretend like it never happened. But what do you do when it’s hard to forget?
For starters, if you felt hurt, grieve. It’s okay. Sometimes, these things happen. It wasn’t pre-planned. But it happened. It’s unfortunate. It hurts. Yes, it does.
The feeling that seems like anger or pain is essentially a sense of loss of control. There’s a need to feel loved, there’s a need for attention, need to not feel insecure and there’s a need for continuity.
The problem with all this is that we almost always seek these things externally. So, if we can’t get it from one person, we try to get it from another. But this isn’t sustainable.
If only we knew how to love ourselves, give ourselves attention or make us feel secure, we might just be able to thrive even in the face of adversity. Ironically, it’s not until one is faced with adversity that you really learn to protect yourself better. So, is there any way to protect ourselves without ever being hurt?
Unfortunately not.
Because, love hurts. It sucks. And it’s okay.