by Lawrence George

Created on: September 10, 2009   Last Updated: September 15, 2010

Love hurts because we need each other.

We are often confused, or misled, by the fact that we live such independent lives. Most of us work; many of us live alone; we are single parents. We think we can cope on our own. We think we don't have the time for a relationship, or that we'd rather just "date" or occasionally sleep with someone.

The changes in our world over the past forty years have been seismic. We are still figuring out how to deal with them, even those of us born and raised to understand that there is probably no one single person for us, and that we are most likely to drift through life with partners we change at regular intervals.

The trouble is that it isn't just about you, or me. It's about us. We often hear that humans are social animals. But that is only half the story. We're also loving animals, capable of loving others more than ourselves and sacrificing ourselves for them. It isn't as simple as a parent loving their child more than themselves - that is a blood relationship, a genetic inheritance - there is a kind of animalistic survival element to this.

It means we can see something in another that makes them worth more to ourselves than our own life. Call it stupid, call it silly - but it's out there.

Whatever the chemical or biological basis for it, love is capable of changing the personality and it can do it permanently.

Why do we call this "falling in love"? Because it means we lose control, we have no choice as to where we go or what we do, and it is the other who draws us towards them. This exciting, adrenaline-fuelled process is what writes the songs and the novels and the films, but it's not what keeps us together. It's how we've adjusted when we've fallen.

If you try and hammer or split this moulded being, it will hurt. If you attack it with unfaithfulness, or coldness, or sarcasm - it will begin to crack and splinter. It can always be fixed, but the process is painful and sometimes it has to be remade anew. It is never possible to find the original blueprints of this being and start again.

Love hurts because love, the changing of a person to live with another, is the mark of life itself, the thing which gives an individual life meaning in a collective world. It gives purpose to all those beautiful emotions we have - joy, sadness, fear, hope - and it makes it impossible for us to survive as we were before. The transformation itself is difficult.

But love cannot cope with hatred, or bitterness, or contempt. Those things are not stronger than love, but they are corrosive. If you spill acid on your hand, it burns as it corrodes your flesh. If you spill bitterness on your relationship, or if contempt forces its way in through a flirtation or affair - the pain you feel will be that of love being destroyed.

Destruction hurts. Order is replaced by chaos. Purpose by chance and wilderness. The human will to create is defeated.

Reading back over this article, I notice that I have started in an ordinary style and ended up semi-poetically (as TS Eliot might have said, "a worn out poetical fashion"). That's because what we are left with is feeling, indescribable but overwhelming feeling. Writing about that in a "useful" way is in itself useless. I don't expect this article to be highly-rated, nor do I care particularly. This is not about deckchairs, or reading, or ways of paying for healthcare.

This is the purpose of human existence itself.

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