To Love Like You’ve Never Been Hurt
To everyone who’s ever loved and lost — and longs to love again
To everyone who’s ever loved and lost — and longs to love again
Photo by Ryan Moreno on Unsplash
Love didn’t hurt you
didn’t drown you
didn’t make you less.
We think love is the thing that hurt us, and so we build defenses against it. We want to fall in love, but we equally want to protect ourselves from ever being hurt that way again. And the truth is that we can’t do both.
After nearly every heartbreak, I would tell myself that I was done with love — by which I meant I was done with being hurt. So, I became more reserved while appearing open. I gave what I was willing to give but kept back my secret self, in case I ever needed an escape hatch for the relationship. Even when I met my current partner, I was still guarded, still unconvinced that love was something that would ever be for me. But I’ve come to understand that the experience of love is for everyone — we just set unrealistic expectations for the experience by assuming that loving well means avoiding pain.
There is no way to protect ourselves and love fully. We cannot build fortresses around our hearts and expect love to flow freely in. It doesn’t work that way. To love fully, we have to brave vulnerability. We have to risk the kind of closeness that will almost certainly hurt us at times. To love another imperfect human is to accept that sometimes they will hurt us on the sharp edges of unhealed wounds — and that we will hurt them the same way.
We seem to have created this mistaken idea that loving has no sharp edges, that love should be something soft and unbroken, a perfect thing we can hold in our hands. But if we are not perfect, neither is our love. We may feel it perfectly and perform it poorly, trying and failing to get it right because our aim is for perfection rather than progress. We don’t avoid pain — even in the healthiest relationship. We just learn to navigate it.
My love is strong, but it is not perfect. I’m not either. For too long, I was on an endless quest for what I called self-improvement but was really perfection. I needed to be perfect so that no one I loved would ever leave me again.
To do this, to aim for any sort of perfection, I had to make myself small enough not to have those jagged places from my past. To ever be small enough, I had to ignore them. I had to mark them outside of the lines, draw careful borders with smaller territory. I had to be willing to overlook most things and to sit quietly through all of my own feelings to make enough space for theirs. Being perfect for them meant being smaller for me.
It didn’t work. It never does. Some of my relationships lasted — but they weren’t strong, connected, or healthy. I had made myself something other, and doing so had me connecting with people who weren’t a good fit for me while losing myself in the process.
The right partner doesn’t want our perfection, our ability to constantly please and never disappoint. The right partner wants us raw, messy, and vulnerable if it means that we’re real. It becomes easy to identify the wrong partner because we finally let down our guard, and we are met with their disapproval and criticism. We are never allowed to just be without seeing the love drain slowly from their eyes. Then leaving altogether.
But can we love like we’ve never been hurt?
The hurt exists. It’s a fact. To deny it isn’t what healing looks like. And if we’re very honest with ourselves, the first cuts we experience happen so early in our lives that we cannot extricate them without removing what makes us who we are. We cannot live without collecting little hurts along the way, never mind the ones that were unimaginable.
So, maybe we don’t need to love like we’ve never been hurt.
Maybe we just need to love.
We don’t need to learn to do it. We know how to love. We create enough defenses against it to know that if we didn’t, we would surely experience it again and again. To love is natural.
The real challenge isn’t to learn to love like we’ve never been hurt but to learn how to nurture relationships where we can love and be loved without the unrealistic expectation that we will never be hurt inside it. Relationships can exist without intimacy, but do we really want relationships that only ever touch the surface of who we are?
Yes, we want to be loved, but we also have a desire to be seen for who we are and loved, not despite it, but because of it. We cannot have that level of connection and intimacy when we never let down our guards, when we’re so focused on a potential hurt that we miss out on a present joy.
Love is not the thing that hurts us. Life hurts us. Miscommunications hurt us. Being flawed and making mistakes hurts us. But we heal, too.
We forget that bit about resilience — how we hurt, but we also have this amazing capacity to heal. We can partner whole, healing humans and still accept they won’t ever be perfect — and neither will we. Maybe we stop trying so hard to reach that standard and instead try a little harder to be real. And in doing so, we might create a little space for our partners to do the same.
Love like that doesn’t look like never hurting each other. It looks like trying not to, but doing our best to make it right when it does. It doesn’t look like never disagreeing or always being on the exact same page at the exact same time. It looks like allowing for individual differences, for growth, and for building a life that factors in a little variance.
I got so tired in relationships where I had to always be on, the performance never allowed to stop so I could breathe. I got tired of making myself smaller and creating space for everyone but me. I grew weary of endless adoration that seemed only to flow in one direction once they realized that I was somehow less than the idea they had of me, as if their flaws were excusable and mine were not.
I don’t love that way anymore. I’m not trying to be perfect. I just want to be real — and to connect with the person I love in all his realness. I can accept that neither of us is perfect — and that we will likely hurt each other along the way. When it happens, we’ll work through it without assuming every little pain takes something away from our love.
We don’t have to love like we’ve never been hurt before. We can love like we absolutely have been hurt — but we’re healing. We can love in all our imperfections without constantly overcorrecting in hopes of ever managing perfection. We don’t need a love that’s perfect — just one that’s real.
If we want it, we might want to stop trying to love like we haven’t been hurt — and just love exactly as we are.
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