Why Love Is The Greatest Pain

I want to start with a quote that I love a lot and it’s from Roland Barthes:

“Love, At First Sight, Is Always Spoken In The Past Tense. The Scene Is Perfectly Adapted To This Temporal Phenomenon: Distinct, Abrupt, Framed, It Is a Memory”…

For as long as I can remember, I had a soft spot for love and melancholy, and I think those two things are intimately interrelated. Love and sadness exist in the same space. There is a reason the filmmaker Cameron Crowe uses the term “Happy-Sad” to describe those moments that move us, that swell us, that we become engorged with emotions.

Roland Barthes explored this beautifully in his book “ A Lover’s Discourse”. There’s a couple of line in it that I really love. He says:

“The first thing we love is a scene, which is seen for the first time. Curtain parts, and what had never been seen is devoured by the eyes”.

This is the line that really gets me. This idea that when we are struck by love, it is immediately already a memory. The moment is happening, and you are already mourning the fact that the moment will end.

The intertwining of the melancholy of loss, that is literally embedded in the experience of the rapture is what’s so unique and mesmerizing about love. But it’s also what makes it so tragic.

There’s a reason that Roland Bathes cites love as, “The Romantic Solution To The Problem Of Death”. That our lovers act as stand-ins in staged, managed, resurrection. Where the pilgrim without faith can die and live again.

These death and re-birth simulations are allowing us to finally turn our lovers into Gods and Goddesses. It’s every pop song, it’s every romantic movie you’ve ever seen. You know the feeling it moves us to tears. But who cares.

Because as Albert Camus says:

“Life Should be lived to the point of tears”.

It Hurts When You Leave

Love itself isn’t painful, it’s the temptation of not knowing what’s next that produce pain. If you break up with your partner and he or she leaves you, you will feel the greatest pain in the love. Because you don’t know about what’s next and all the negative feelings are blasting into your mind like I’m gonna die, I can’t live, I can’t find anyone else, I’m too late.

Now, what’s happening inside of our mind is that the same thoughts from the same person which was making us feel loved, Now the same thoughts from that same person are making us feel miserable.

That’s why the historical lovers used to say “ being burn by love”. And this feeling of being burn hurts so much that some people can’t trust the process again for a second time through their lives.

I’m not going to the pain that leaving someone down can contain. The pain of ego, body, and mind makes our life like hell. But the love overall is fully worth the pain.

Love Is Pain But It’s Totally Worth It

Love fills a great feeling in our lives that we all are lacking without love. Love gives us feelings of grace, faith, and safety. You feel safe, you feel secure when you create a cosmic universe with your lover. And even when you have nothing to put you back you will feel like that you are the Gods of time. And you can do anything just because of your lover that makes you feel powerful and safe.

Imagine the following scenario:

You are waiting for a train, you don’t know where this train will take you. But it doesn’t matter. On that train, you will be together with your lover.

And that’s the feeling of true love. Even when you don’t have anything, even when you are insecure in the sight of others but it doesn’t matter because you are with someone that is above all that stuff.

And of course, that context is that when you find that person in whose eyes you feel reflected and enveloped then you have entered into the forever box. You have entered in a Holy space, a space where you are rendered whole and you are rendered wholly together.

You can’t imagine it if you haven’t tasted it. And if you have, then you are the luckiest ones who are living and living a life full of love.

Bottom Line

There is no such experience as LOVE that makes human bonds timeless. We cannot imagine it in fiction, we cannot describe it in words but once we have that experience it becomes the purpose of our life.

In the article, there is nothing that makes you feel pain because you are in love. But rather if you feel pain in the love, remember that it worth the pain. It worth every smile and every tear that you drop.