Love Shouldn't Hurt

How can you say you love and care for someone when you bring that person pain, uncertainty, embarrassment, anxiety, and insult? Wait – I know the answer to that one – you don’t love them! Justifying actions that clearly hurt and demoralize your partner (or friend) is self-serving, not loving, and is psychologically abusive. Here’s a tip: If your actions hurt the one you love, they are the wrong actions. Period.

Love is an action based on the conviction of commitment, not on the ebb and flow of emotion. The emotion of feeling overwhelmingly drawn to someone, sexually turned on to them, or fuzzy all over when they walk into a room or the thought of them comes to mind, is intermittent, fragile, and too easily pushed aside by such other competing emotions as boredom, depression, health issues, financial circumstances, familiarity, annoyances, and so forth. It is the sense of obligation due to the seriousness of the commitment that provides the impetus for appropriate behavior in spite of momentary glitches in “that loving feeling.”

And, most importantly, it is the “behaviors” of loving that help stimulate and perpetuate those “loving feelings.” That’s right! Your behaviors largely determine your feelings. If you require proof of that, remember all those times when you felt down, but spiffed up your dress, stiffened up your lip, and marched into the fray – the very act of behaving undepressed and confident put you in the position to reinforce those healthier feelings. The same works for intimacy; behaving in a loving way taps into those stored-away positive feelings for your partner and generates positive reactions from his or her feedback which makes you feel even better and closer.

So, why hate when you can love?

Here are the choices: Stay and suffer, stay and go crazy, stay and pray, stay and demand things to change, stay and take the risks, or leave.