The pain of love



The pain of love


How do you know you truly love someone?  It is so easy to say ‘I love you’ when you get that beautiful feeling inside and everything is rosy.
The word love has been glamorized in the media and in our minds.  When we think of love, we imagine walks in the park, sharing a desert, dancing to music in the night, pillow fights, beautiful conversations, making love all night long and all the nice things portrayed in movies and novels.  These things are indeed beautiful and hence we believe love is beautiful.
But this is the problem.  How can love be beautiful when at its deepest, love can be hurtful, love is suffering, and love can be painful.  This writer dares to say love is not these beautiful things but rather that love is ugly.
There is a belief that to be in love, we must experience all these beautiful things to validate the love.  But that cannot be right.  Take an example of an old couple who have been together for 25 years.  The couple cannot be expected to make love all night long for fear of cardiac arrests.  Nor will they probably have conversations till the early hours of the morning because they must have said it all in the past.  But there is no doubt that after 25 years, it must be love keeping them together.
Their love is refined and has stood the test of time.  Staying with someone for 25 years takes a lot of hard work, compromise, suffering, patience, and humility.  These are painful things that one must go through before you can truly say you love someone.  For how can you say you love someone and not be ready to compromise?  Compromise is an act of selflessness which goes beyond the normal human behavior for human beings are not born altruistic.  But compromise is painful and comes at the expense of your pride and ego.
This writer only realized what true love was when he stripped away his pride and ego to beg for the forgiveness of the one he loved even though she did him wrong in the first place.   To complicate matters, she had already started seeing someone else quite soon after the break up and this writer was still willing to overlook that and ask her back.  This is difficult for a man to do because a man is his ego and quashing that ego is as good as emasculating him.  Unfortunately this is not one of those stories that ends happily ever after and this writer had to endure rejection from the one he loved and once shared his life with.
And we have heard so many stories like this one and some a lot worse about the pain that comes with love.  A pain so great, so many love souls are willing to defy all logic and sell their self worth to make the pain go away.  A pain so great that even the God of the universe sacrificed his only son for the sake of love.
You know you are in love when you are ready to endure suffering for the sake of the one.  You know you are in love when you are ready to compromise your self-worth for the object of your affection.  You know you are in love when you are willing to embrace the weaknesses of your other half even if these flaws are detrimental to your happiness.  How can love be beautiful then?
Yet we still love and love again.  Yet we still hurt and suffer more.   For everyone that says ‘I love you’ must be tested.  You can never really prove how much you love someone till you show how much pain you are willing to suffer for them.  True love and perfect love is shown at the point of the most suffering.  It is at this most painful point, when all is said and done, when all facades are peeled away, that you still stand there for the sake of love.
I conclude by reminding us of that popular quote; ‘Love conquers all”.  There can be no conquest without a fight. There can be no fight without enduring pain.
Do you still love me?

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