Letters to My Son: Why Love Hurts

My dear son,

You are standing at the edge of a great, messy threshold. You are beginning to understand the weight of another person. It is a heavy thing, love. It is a burden that promises to lift you while it simultaneously presses your face into the mud. We should talk about that. We should be honest about it, for once, before the silence takes us both back.

There is a specific kind of stupidity involved in opening a door when you know there is a gale blowing on the other side. That is what we do. We open ourselves. We take the latches off the ribs and say, here, look at this, look at the pulsing, vulnerable meat of it.

It is an invitation to be destroyed.

When we love, we are essentially handing someone a blunt instrument and hoping they have the grace not to use it, or at least the aim to make it quick. It is a risk. We put our trust in the other person. We sit in a chair and hope the legs do not give way. But chairs are made of wood and wood rots. People are made of intentions and intentions shift like shadows on a wall.

There is always the possibility of betrayal.

Not even the grand, cinematic kind, but the small, daily erosions. The way a look turns cold. The way a hand is withdrawn. We hope they will not hurt us. We hope they will love us back in the same measure, with the same desperate precision. But hope is a lean thing to live on.

There is no guarantee.

There is only the risk that they will find the sight of our open hearts tedious or, worse, something to be stepped upon. This is why it hurts. It hurts because you have moved the shield. You have decided that the cold is preferable to the armor. It is a brave thing, perhaps, or perhaps it is just the only way we know how to fail.

The uncertainty is the worst of it.

We cannot control the weather, and we certainly cannot control the internal weather of another human being. You look at them and you wonder. You wonder if today is the day the tide goes out and never comes back. You worry they will stop. You worry they will find a better room to sit in, a better face to look at. This anxiety is a constant, low humming in the pipes. It is a source of great uncertainty. You are never on solid ground. You are always treading water, waiting for the cramp to take you. It is painful to live in that state of waiting, watching for the exit signs to light up in their eyes.

Then there is the matter of the demand.

Love is not a quiet neighbor. It is a tenant that moves in and starts knocking down the walls. When you love someone, or so the story goes, you want to be with them all the time. You want to spend every waking moment in their proximity, as if their breath is the only thing keeping your own lungs moving. It is a lot of pressure. It is a staggering amount of weight to put on two pairs of shoulders. You want to make them happy. You want to be the source of their joy. But you are barely the source of your own stability.

This desire to be everything to someone is a trap.

It is a demanding, hungry thing. You try to balance your own needs, your own small, private requirements for silence and space, with the needs of the person you have invited in. It is difficult.

It becomes a struggle.

You want to be alone, but you are afraid of being lonely.

You want to be together, but you are afraid of being smothered.

This leads to conflict.

It leads to the kind of resentment that grows in the dark, like fungus. You start to begrudge them the very space they occupy, even as you are terrified of them leaving it.

It is a messy, complicated business, trying to fit two lives into a space meant for one.

We are complicated creatures.

We disagree.

We argue.

We find the exact words that will pierce the skin and we say them, often with a strange, dark satisfaction.

This is part of the relationship.

This is the friction of two stones rubbing together until they are smooth or until they break. It is difficult to deal with these challenges when you are emotionally invested. When your skin is knit to theirs, every pull is a tear.

You cannot see their point of view because your own eyes are stinging. You find it hard to forgive because forgiveness requires a letting go, and you are busy clenching your fists.

And yet, here we are.

We continue. Despite the mess, despite the arguments, despite the certainty of eventual loss, we do not stop. It is a strange, human defect.

Love makes us feel alive. It is a connection to something other than the four walls of our own skulls. It gives a sense of purpose to the act of waking up and putting on one’s boots. It is a meaning, however fragile. It helps us grow, or so they say. It forces us to learn that we are not the center of the universe, which is a useful, if painful, lesson to acquire.

There are statistics, for those who find comfort in such things. They say people in loving relationships live longer. They say the rates of depression are lower, the anxiety less biting.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps it is just that when you have someone else to worry about, you have less time to contemplate your own dissolution. It is a distraction, but it is a grand one. It makes the silence less absolute. It fills the room with a different kind of air. You are healthier, perhaps, because you are being perceived. To be loved is to be witnessed, and there is a profound relief in not having to exist entirely in secret.

It is one of the most rewarding emotions, they tell us. It is a sense of fulfillment. I look at you and I see the possibility of that joy. I also see the possibility of the heartbreak that will surely follow it. They are two sides of the same coin, and the coin is always spinning.

You cannot have the light without the shadow it casts.

You cannot have the joy without the capacity for the void that its absence creates.

It is a risk.

It is a gamble where the house always wins in the end, because the end is always a departure. But the game itself is where the living happens.

So, we return to the question. Why does it hurt to love?

It hurts because love is a risk.

It is the risk of being rejected, of being told that your particular brand of existence is not required.

It is the risk of being disappointed, of realizing that the idol you built is made of the same common clay as yourself.

It is the risk of being hurt so deeply that you forget how to stand up straight.

But it is also the risk of great joy.

It is the risk of happiness. It is the risk of fulfillment.

Is it worth it?

The silence suggests it might be.

The fact that we keep doing it, generation after generation, suggests that the alternative is even less tolerable. We are designed to seek this out, to find the one person who makes the business of existing seem like a worthwhile endeavor.

You will experience this pain.

You will sit in a room, perhaps this very room, and feel as though the walls are closing in because someone has walked out of a door. It is a normal part of life. It is the price of admission.

With time, the edges of the wound will dull.

You will heal, or you will become accustomed to the scar.

You will move on.

You will find someone else to risk your heart with.

You will do it all over again because that is what we do.

We fail, we pick ourselves up, and we fail again. But we do it in the company of others. We do it because to love is to be human, and to be human is to be vulnerable.

Go out into the light, such as it is. Take the risk. Open the door. It will hurt. It will be magnificent.

You have no choice, really, so you might as well do it with your eyes open.

But we’re not done yet.

We must go deeper into this particular brand of suffering, not because it is pleasant, but because it is the only thing that is truly ours. To understand the psychology of this pain, one must look at the mechanics of the trap.

We are born in isolation, a solitary confinement of the soul, and love is the illusory tunnel we dig toward another cell. The pain arises when we realize the tunnel has collapsed, or worse, that it leads exactly where we started, only now we are exhausted and covered in the grit of our own expectations.

We are hollow vessels, and we spend our lives looking for something to pour into the vacuum. When you love, you are not just looking at a person; you are looking at a mirror that promises to show you a version of yourself that is tolerable.

This is the first psychological cruelty.

You hand the power of your own identity to a stranger. You say, “Tell me who I am,” and for a while, they tell you that you are beloved, that you are necessary, that you are whole. The pain begins the moment the mirror flickers.

The human mind is a frantic architect.

It builds a future out of whispers and shared glances. When love falters, it is not just the loss of the person that hurts; it is the demolition of the architecture of your own mind. You had mapped out a world where they existed, and now that map is useless. You are standing in a geography that no longer exists.

The brain, in its primitive desperation, treats this loss like a physical wound. It screams. It demands the limb be reattached. But there is no limb. There is only the cold air where a hand used to be. We are addicted to the chemical spike of being wanted, and the withdrawal is a shivering, grey business. We suffer because we have mistaken a temporary coincidence of two paths for a permanent merging of two souls.

We do not love people. We love the idea of people, and the person eventually gets in the way of the idea.

This is where the friction starts.

You want them to be the balm for your old wounds, the answer to the questions your father never answered, the silence that drowns out your own internal noise. It is an impossible demand. You are asking a fallible, sweating, tired human being to be a god. When they fail to be that god — when they are late, when they are selfish, when they forget the specific cadence of your sorrow — the pain is immense.

It is the pain of the idol breaking. You feel betrayed, not because they did something wrong, but because they had the audacity to be human. This is the messy part. The conflict arises from the gap between the person you imagined and the person who is currently eating toast across from you.

We resent them for their limitations.

We resent them for not being able to save us from ourselves.

And they, in turn, feel the weight of your expectations like a shroud. They struggle to breathe under the pressure of your need. This is the psychology of the argument: two people shouting at the ghosts of who they thought the other was. We are emotionally invested in a fiction, and the truth is a violent editor.

Even when it ends, it does not end.

The mind is a hoarder of ghosts. It keeps the scent of a coat, the particular way a door was closed, the rhythm of a laugh that no longer belongs to you. This is the most enduring pain — the persistence of the memory after the reality has vanished.

We are haunted by the “what if” and the “if only,” those twin vultures that circle the remains of a relationship.

We replay the scenes, looking for the exact moment the rot set in, as if knowing the date of the infection could cure the disease.

It is a rewarding emotion, they say, because it forces you to confront the void. It strips away the pretenses. In the agony of a broken heart, you are finally, indisputably, awake. You are connected to the long, shivering line of humanity that has sat in the dark and wondered how a heart could be so heavy and yet feel so empty.

This is the growth.

It is the growth of a tree that has been pruned back to the stump. It is painful, yes, but it is honest. You learn that you can survive the disappearance of the world. You learn that the self is a resilient, if somewhat battered, thing. You are healthier for knowing the depth of your own capacity to feel, even if that feeling is a sharp, cold ache in the center of your chest.

So why do we go back?

Why, after the skin has finally grown over the wound, do we pick up the knife again?

Because the alternative is the stillness of the grave.

Love is a risk, a catastrophic gamble, a leap into a dark room hoping the floor hasn’t been removed. We do it because the joy, when it comes, is a flare in the night. It is a brief, flickering justification for the long stretches of boredom and despair. It is a fulfillment that defies logic.

Everyone experiences this. It is the common cold of the human spirit. You will move on, not because you want to, but because the clock demands it. You will find love again, and you will find the pain again, and they will be indistinguishable from one another.

You will sit in the debris of your next failed attempt and you will realize that this is the work of being alive. It is a slow, observant process of falling apart and stitching yourself back together with thread that never quite matches the original fabric.

It is deeply human to be this broken.

It is the only way the light gets in, or at least, the only way we notice the light is failing.

We must look at the structure of this emptiness.

Love creates a space in your life that only one person can fill. When they are gone, the space remains, a jagged hole in the center of your daily routine. You reach for a hand that isn’t there. You start a sentence that has no listener. This is the architecture of the void. It is a demanding presence. It requires you to acknowledge it every time you wake up.

But there is a grim beauty in this architecture. The void is where the growth happens. It is the silence that allows you to finally hear your own voice. Relationships are often a way of drowning out the sound of our own inadequacy.

When the relationship fails, you are left with the noise.

You are forced to balance your own needs and wants without the crutch of another person’s approval. This is difficult. It leads to a different kind of resentment — a resentment of the self. But it is also the only path to a sense of purpose that is not dependent on a shifting shadow.

You learn that love is a messy, complicated, and ultimately doomed project. And yet, the rewarding nature of it lies in the attempt.

We are built to try.

We are built to seek out the very thing that will eventually destroy us.

There is a dignity in that.

There is a courage in knowing that the ending is written and choosing to read the book anyway.

So, why does it hurt to love?

It hurts because you are alive, and life is a series of subtractions. It hurts because you have dared to be more than a solitary ghost.

You have gambled with the only currency you have — your time and your vulnerability. It is a risk of being hurt, of being rejected, of being disappointed.

But the alternative is a safety that is indistinguishable from death.

You will heal, not because you are special, but because the biology of the body is geared toward survival. The cortisol will eventually recede. The heart will return to its original shape, though it will be scarred.

You will move on.

You will find another person to fail with. And in that failing, you will find a flicker of joy, a moment of fulfillment that makes the entire wretched business seem, for a heartbeat, like it was worth the effort.

Do not fear the failure, son.

Embrace it.

Wear it like a shroud that eventually becomes a suit of clothes.

Go into the world and fail again. Fail better.

It is the most human thing you can do.

The light is nearly gone now. The paper is almost full. The rest is silence, and the waiting.

Dad

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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Photo credit: Miha Arh on Unsplash