painful love - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing
Being in love can be painful if you aren't sure that the love is mirrored the same way in the one you love. The pain comes from fear and the need to feel loved, nurtured and protected - as you wish to love, nurture and protect the one you love. You want to 'come home' but you aren't sure that it is your home, or that you can keep it as you feel the emotional need to. That stage should pass when you either get together or move on. If it lasts after you get together then something is wrong because you should now feel safe and assured that the other loves you as much as you love them. One who keeps you insecure has not love for you but possession of you. And whilst passionate love often takes a form of protective possession, it does reassure and give security, nuture, emotional warmth and dependable kindness. It takes real bravery to bring your thoughts to these issues, yet the rewards of getting love right are great. It is the reward of finding your own personal heaven on earth, a place from which you can become the best version of you and follow your dreams.
Real love is never painful unless it is the pain of parting. Love is comfort and protection, it is nurture and acceptance. It is calm and passionate. It is stoic and spontaneous. It is generous and forgiving, a steady ship into any horizon. What we call painful love is not love at all, it is a taker and a giver, the giver as the bucket of water and the taker poking new holes in the vessel, quenching their thirst. It is the difference between symbiosis and a parasite. We can all be negative at times, we can all have needs. Relationships can become lopsided in terms of the giving and receiving for defined periods for good reasons, and flexibility is key. Yet the brain is built of our everyday actions over time, with layers and layers of intricate wiring that add up to form who we are. If one person wires themselves for empathy and the other for cold emotional indifference and that carries on for months and years, then the relationship will sink even if the people in it have proudly built their Titanic. Then pain is guaranteed. So, to keep your partner, to keep the one you love, remember this balance, remember to keep the empathy part of your brain fit and healthy.
The painful love comes in two varieties, the good and the bad. For there can be pain in separation from your true love. Yet when it is good the separation builds you both stronger as individuals and as a couple, as partners in all you do. For in these moments of pain is the truth of what you are to one another. Such separation can be the golden ticket to realising that you are soulmates, the forever person of one another. The bad kind of painful love is when one partner is emotionally cold. They want the relationship and perhaps cling to it, even fight for it, but in truth they always put themselves first and are incapable if being the hero the loving partner deserves. As such, until separation, the loving and empathic partner is in pain, most often confused as to why this love hurts and feeling that love is difficult. Their pain comes because they aren't loved, they are consumed by the other. At some deep level they realise that if they stop the endless one-sided giving and support they will be abandoned, yet if they continue then in a few decades hence or sooner, emotional exhaustion will set in and threaten their mental and physical health. So, ask yourself, is your pain the good kind or the one you need to find the escape hatch for? Be honest. You life depends on it.
Painful love, unless it is at bereavement, can be a symptom of a parasitic relationship where one partner is empathic and the other is emotionally indifferent.