Love doesn't hurt

LOVE DOESN'T HURT

There's an image I keep coming back to for this one — two people, face to face, hands resting gently on each other's shoulders. No tension in it anywhere. Nobody bracing. That's the whole point of this post.

If you learn in your formative years that love hurts — if what you watched modelled to you as love came wrapped in dysfunction, fear, or control — then it stands to reason that everything moving forward gets shaped by that lesson. Your baseline for "normal" gets quietly rewired before you're old enough to question it. And here's the part that took me a long time to accept: understanding that intellectually doesn't automatically protect you from it. I can analyse a pattern, name it, explain exactly why it happens and where it came from. I've always been good at that. And still, knowing it didn't stop the predators from finding me, or stop twisted versions of love from seeping through anyway. Insight and immunity are not the same thing.

So let me say the thing as plainly as I can.

Love doesn't hurt. Love really shouldn't hurt.

By which I mean a hundred things at once. You shouldn't be frightened of the person you love. You shouldn't dread the sound of a door opening. You should be able to grow, change, take up space, and be fully yourself — without censorship, without flinching, without shrinking yourself down to keep the peace. If any of that is missing, what you're in isn't love with some flaws in it. It's something else wearing love's clothes.

I'm 53 now. I've fully accepted a life without a romantic relationship — it's been that way since I was 32. Three decades of very little success in that area, if I'm honest, and I'm done looking for it now.

I'm done in the most beautiful way I can be done with something.

There's grief in that, and I'm not going to pretend there isn't — grief for a version of love I never got to find, for the relationship that might have looked like the picture above and never did. But grief and acceptance aren't opposites. They can sit in the same place at the same time. I've grieved it, and I'm genuinely okay without it. Not okay because I've given up. Okay because I know exactly what love is supposed to feel like now, and I'd rather have none of it than a version that hurts.

Photograph: Madeline and Ryan, Daisy's Hair Shop, Nuneaton | Photography: Dave Sutton

If anything in this post reflects your own relationship — fear, dread, shrinking yourself to avoid conflict — please know that isn't what love is supposed to feel like, and you deserve support in seeing your own way through it. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is free, 24 hours, on 0808 2000 247.