You’re surrounded by love from the moment you come to this world. Your parents, grandparents, and other family members love you just because you were born.
Age you grow, your love branches out – and you begin to love objects and things other than just people. You’ll claim your love for your furry four-legged friends, chocolates, shooting basketball, certain music, and so on. Your life is filled with love – left, right and center.
But one day, that special someone enters your life and sweeps you off your feet. This more-than-welcome invasion of your mind tugs at your heart until you will find yourself at your wit’s end, unable to grasp the rhyme or reason for things happening around you.
Life goes into slow-motion, and you’re walking on clouds. All those corny, cheesy love songs start making perfect sense.
Your life is altered, and it’s never been better for you. Dr. Seuss gets the biggest thumbs up when he says, “You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because the reality is finally better than your dreams.”
You’re truly, madly, deeply in love. You can’t wait to wake up and start your day texting/calling him. You can’t wait to see him and spend as much time as is possible by his side. You love him so much it’s beginning to hurt. But why?
Keep reading for an attempt to understand why you may be loving him so much that it hurts, and what you can do about it.
1. There’s intense physical attraction.
When it comes to love, physical attraction can’t be ignored. Often, people who find the person they love can’t explain their feelings, and it leads you to believe in the “visually impaired Cupid”.
The inexplicable circumstance these lovebirds find themselves in can be a consequence of well-aligned stars and the physical attraction that immediately sparked romance in them.
For reasons unknown, you could be feeling the “hurt” of love because you can’t resist the pull of that fierce attraction.
2. Your heart literally skips a beat.
When you see him, your heart literally skips a beat. As if to make up for it, sometimes the heart beats so fast you feel like you’re running out of breath. Blood rushes to your cheeks, and you even feel hot and feverish. You smile so much and for so long that your cheeks start hurting.
With all these physiological changes happening in your body as a reaction to seeing your loved one and being in love, your body can be super confused. When your body fails to understand these sensations, it may translate the confusion/changes as an abnormality, and register it as hurting.
3. Your anxiety gets the better of you.
The mere thought of potentially breaking up increases your level of anxiety. Plus, the level of anxiety is equal if not more, when you’re merely on your way to see your loved one.
As the level of anxiety fluctuates, stress hormones go to work – and the act of placating the anxiety by balancing stress hormones can manifest as hurting.
When you’re anxious and your thoughts start aimlessly and heedlessly racing in your mind, it can cause a headache. You won’t be able to communicate with clarity, and anxiety can surface as a physical feeling of hurt.
4. You’re “addicted” to love.
Not only do stress hormones come to play when you’re in a relationship, but other feel-good hormones are created and flooded into your system – especially when you’re thinking about or with the one you love.
These overwhelming, positive, happy hormones recede when the loved one is absent. Your system will feel the crash and crave for those pleasure feelings to come back.
The entire mechanism is similar to withdrawal symptoms in people with substance abuse. Love is addictive, and its withdrawal symptoms can be literally painful.
5. He’s hurting.
When you’re in love, you want him to have all the joy in the world and never feel hurt. You want to protect him from all the harm and pain in the world. However, no matter how much you try and without it being your fault, your beloved may go through some tough times.
You’ll feel the hurt he feels if, for example, he gets into an accident, or loses someone in his family, causing an emotional blow. You’ll hurt more seeing your loved one hurt and being unable to do anything to help or reverse the adverse situation.
Sometimes, when you’re completely in sync with your partner, you’ll feel when he’s hurting, in a very telepathic sort of way.
6. Compromising is hard to do.
The unwritten code of ethics for all things love has “COMPROMISE” in all caps somewhere on top. As lovers, you do things for each other based on each others’ likes and dislikes, and you’re often forced to compromise often – which can be hard.
You prefer to go out clubbing and dance the night away, while he prefers to stay home just the two of you. You give in – and spend a beautiful weekend together at his place. You’re happy because he’s happy, and by doing what he enjoys, you both had a great time.
Next weekend, you want to go hiking, but he has an office party and obligations get in the way. Although on the surface you may have a happy façade, somewhere down the line you’ll start feeling a tiny tinge of hurt.
7. Hurt lingers from past experiences.
You’ve had your share of bad breakups – maybe even one that was so brutal it had broken your heart pretty bad. You remember the hurt, the pain, and how it took months and months to put your bruised heart back together.
It still hurts you to think of that relationship, and you unintentionally and unknowingly bring that pain to the new relationship. The constant fear that resulted from your traumatic past split can turn into agonizing pain.
Any unresolved issues from the past that may have caused you to reserve some doubts for any kind of relationship can add to the hurt too.
8. Human nature has an impact.
Human beings are extremely unpredictable. Let’s take the Freudian idea of ID, ego, and superego to keep the explanation simple. It’s driven by the pleasure principle, ego by the reality principle, and superego by morality principle.
The human mind is always at war, and oftentimes there is no knowing which side will emerge as the winner. With such unpredictability, you’ll never be able to be certain that you’ll live happily ever after. Anything can happen, anytime.
If your man isn’t expressive or decisive enough, you’ll be in a constant state of limbo and confusion about the future that you’ll feel hurt by the unpredictability of it all.
9. Your “past life” may have an affect on your feelings.
If nothing can explain why you love him so much that it hurts, it might be time to explore the possibility of a past life. You may have been unrequited lovers in a past life or lovers who never got to live as lovers, like Romeo and Juliet.
While it may sound hard to believe, it could be karma’s way of telling you that the hurt you’re feeling is from a past life.
10. Identity crisis
At rare times, you’ll remember the life you lived before entering your relationship – including your ambitions and aspirations. While you don’t regret changing your life for him, you might subconsciously let your mind linger on the “what-ifs” – and might question your decisions.
Even though you may not dwell on these thoughts for long, that teeny tiny “identity crisis” lodged somewhere in the corners of your mind sometimes show up uninvited and unexpected, and cause you a wee bit of hurt.
When you suppress your real self for too long or ignore who you really are, your outer shell will sooner or later start to show some cracks – that will ultimately scrape, bruise, and hurt.
What Can You Do?
We’ve discussed some emotional, physiological, and spiritual aspects that might help you understand why it sometimes hurts to love someone.
If any of the reasons mentioned above explains your hurt feelings, then you know the source of your pain.
Here are some ways to deal with how you’re feeling:
Communicate
The one thing that can help heal your hurt is communication. Have a candid one-on-one with your partner and keep him in the know. This will help strengthen your emotional bond and clear a lot of misunderstandings that may have arisen, had you kept it inside.
Seek help
Sometimes speaking to experts can help put things into perspective. If you have unresolved past problems or anxiety issues, you can talk to your partner, but seek help from the experts as well.
The Bottom Line
Even with all the hurting that you will experience only because you love him so much, there is truly no better bliss than being in love. The Beatles were right in saying, “All you need is love.”
At the end of the day, though, there’s no substitute for love and the feelings that come with it. As the saying goes, “No pain, no gain” – so a little hurt to gain a bit of love is still a winning ticket.
