Love Is Pain

To truly love is to hurt, at least a little.

Not because love itself should hurt, or because the people we love inevitably hurt us. That is the more familiar meaning of the phrase. Someone who knows you intimately also knows exactly where you are vulnerable.

I mean something quieter.

To love someone is to feel their absence.

When they are gone for an afternoon, it might barely register. When they are gone for a week, there is a discomfort to it. Not necessarily sadness, but the feeling of being away from home, from an activity you love, or from friends you have not seen in too long. Life continues normally. It is simply missing something you have grown accustomed to having in it.

And when they are completely gone, the small discomfort becomes something else.

This is not only romantic love. It is true of friends, parents, siblings, children, and perhaps anything we allow ourselves to love deeply enough.

We sometimes talk about love as though two incomplete people become whole together. I don't think that is necessary. We can be whole on our own.

But whole things can have additions.

A person enters your life. You make room for them. Slowly, almost without noticing, that room becomes theirs. Their presence becomes ordinary. It becomes part of what home feels like.

When they leave, you are not suddenly half a person.

You are still whole.

There is simply an empty space where something once was.

Maybe that is part of what it means to love someone. Not that they complete you, but that you allow their presence to matter enough that their absence can hurt.

To love without that possibility would be safer.

I am not sure it would be love.