When It Comes To Love: Pain is Inevitable.
Different kinds of love bring different levels of pain.
Some are temporary, some lasting, some accidental and some inevitable.
There is also the kind of pain that would make even the smallest glimmer of hope say fuck this I’m out of here. Luckily for us, the pain that comes from the first debacle of relationship hell, otherwise known as puppy love, is the pain that hope forgets about.
Nine times out of 10 puppy love ends in a prepubescent whirlwind of pain that feels like a slow death by a swarm of killer bees.
The pain that’s accidental can be an utter mystery. Perhaps accidental is not the right word—no, definitely not the right word. Let’s go with unexpected. When the hope of a new potential love (sure, let’s call it that) is going well, it’s a great feeling. You get butterflies when you see his name in your texts. You have late night conversations for hours. You talk about childhood, family, hopes and dreams. You wonder what his touch would feel like and intuitively know that his kiss will wreck you.
There’s a feeling that this could go somewhere. You have a romantic date that ruins you, and eventually his kiss does, in fact, wreck you.
What occurs next is not cool on any level. It’s usually something (insert really bad thing here) that happens as often as a blue moon or a shark attack, when you only swim twice a year. In one quick clearly god hates me moment, the potential love comes to a standstill.
You’ve hit a brick wall.
The wall is so thick, you wonder if you can maybe get around it, or climb over it. There doesn’t seem to be a sign that getting through it is possible. Then what? Do you call it a day? Do you use the “it’s just an early test” theory, because you see so much good in the other person that you want to just be there for them?
When you try to be there for them, you slam directly into the brick wall you already knew was there. Now I have a visual of the Energizer bunny in my head. Fantastic. Maybe it just sounds silly to put so much thought into something that hasn’t even had the chance to develop, but if you’re anything like me, you are a fighter—more often than not, to my own detriment. I will not date someone’s potential, but when things are new, and something unexpectedly strains things, its really awful. It’s confusing and horrible, and feels like the crash from a bad acid trip.
Baffling right? You wonder if it’s fixable. You probably wonder a lot of things. What you shouldn’t wonder is what the other person is thinking. You’ll never be right, unless you communicate. Perhaps I should take my own advice…
The worst pain I’ve seen in my lifetime isn’t necessarily over a love that is romantic. It is the death of someone you love, and that love can come in any form.
I don’t tend to bring up things so grievous in nature, unless I try and find some humor in it to share. However, it is my job as a writer to speak my truth. I would be doing myself and you a great disservice if I did not.
It may be a bit selfish to touch upon a subject that is so sad, but I cannot write wholly unless this is put on paper. Two weeks ago I lost a dear friend; someone whom I loved. This loss has evoked a pain that for me is massive, not that I haven’t had horrendous break ups or been through a divorce, but this pain is different from any other.
There is uniqueness to its depth and an uncertainty to its longevity. It lives in every cell at any given moment. It is brutal and seems to stay just underneath the surface of everything I’ve done for the past few weeks. It will not completely go away. It may never go away.
Saying goodbye was the hardest.
It took what seemed like days to walk inside, my feet dragging as if they were encased in cement.
When I stood over him I felt as if I was looking at him though someone else’s eyes as my head flooded with memories. Everything I had ever wanted to say to him stuck to my vocal chords, unable to come out. I tried to say them in my head, foolishly hoping to transmit them to him somehow, but I felt dumb standing there for more than a minute.
He was so still, and his personality and life force were massive, and gone too soon.
I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to say I love you. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and tell him not to go. To implore him to stay with his sister Jess, to selfishly ask for more of his laughter and light and craziness. But when I walked into that room, I promised that I would leave any regrets there.
All of these things have made me wonder… with all of this pain why do we bother? What makes it all worth it to have our hearts trampled on or our guts yanked out to be left with a gaping hole that you think will never heal?
(Questions on love, sex and relationships? This is the fourth installment of a sizzling new weekly advice column, When It Comes To Love. Ask me anything. Dig it or hate it, we’ll get through this together. Email your questions to Ronna at eleadvice@gmail.com)
~ Editor: Anne Clendening
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Ronna I love you with my whole heart, and will never ever ever have a night quite as insane as Dirty Love/Sex and the City/Ben and Jerry's night. It was a horrible reason to have a wonderful evening. I miss Bubs constantly, and I can only hope hew knew we love him as much as we do.
I love you Heidi. Buba touched so many of us. I hope that expressing how much he was loved wil touch anyone who reads this. He deserves that.
thanks for the Sixteen Candles reference…
You're quite welcome. I never thought the kitchen table thing would really happen
for love, for loss, for having no regrets, I say a prayer and raise my glass…
Cheers Lauren!
I experienced something that so closely matches your description of your experience (he was my puppy love and my early twenties love (when he died), and I think my soul mate too). 6 years later it still hurts . . . a lot . . . to the point that reading your post brings tears to my eyes and tugs on my heart and soul. There tears for you as well as tears of my pain, as I’m best able to experience my own devastations (which I seem to avoid as much as possible) when my empathy for someone else stems from something painful that I too have gone through. 16 years from now it will still hurt . . . and 30 years from now, , , and I don’t doubt it will hurt when I’m 80. Like you, though, I am thankful to have loved even if that love came with such tremendous loss. I am confident I will still feel the same gratitude when I’m old and gray with some of this pain still in my heart.
I’m so sorry and my heart goes out to you as you face one of the most painful things I hope you ever face I’m also thankful for your sake that you’re able to be grateful for the love. That love will be with you forever — you’ll be reminded of it randomly by the most mundane things, during your most amazing experiences and milestones, in your darkest hours, in your dreams, in nature and in future love you receive. Without that gratitude, I can only believe that it would be much harder to receive the love that will resurface again and again. It may not always be easy when you feel it though; it can be so bittersweet. One second you’ll be filled with joy to feel something that has started to feel so distant. The familiarity of that joy will almost certainly take you back in time, as though nothing ever happened. You’re subconscious will long to call you’re lost love . . . or hold him . . . or look into his eyes. And then you’ll be dropped like a ton of bricks when reality sets back in. But even after that manic upheaval of emotions, you will feel gratitude. Gratitude to have loved (even if it meant having to lose too) and gratitude for the perspective this experience will have created in you. With great faith and experience, I share that one day you may look back and see that your life was richer or lived in a way that it may not have been had you lost someone you loved so dearly. This will never take away the pain or bring you to a place of true understanding about why someone so wonderful was taken too soon, but hopefully allows you to be an even greater you and allows you to live in a way that would have made you’re lost love even prouder of you than I’m sure he already way.
Continue to honor that love, as you did in this beautiful post. Be kind and gentle with yourself too. Best of luck and lots of love.
Thank you so much Caroline for sharing your experience. I miss my friend dearly and his loss has changed so many of us and shaken us to our cores. He was lucky to have such a large extended family and I was lucky to call him my friend. He was a beautiful soul and with the exception of a loss that happened in my teens I have not been so deeply affected by the sudden loss of anyone like I have this. I do not know why it hit me on the level it has. Perhaps it is due in part to the regret of not visiting sooner or the regret of not knowing he needed us as much as he did.
His name has earned a spot on my arm and none of us will ever forget him….
Some people affect us for the moment they touch our lives.
Some people affect us longer.
But some, without attempt or recognition of their effect, change us from the first moment we meet, until the last of our breaths.
♥
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Ronna thank you for such a beautiful piece
[...] natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today? ~ Joan [...]