Over 15 years, I’ve heard countless clients repeat back to me the common saying that “love hurts” but is love really supposed to hurt?
In this article, we will compare the cultural understanding with love as pain with the science of relationships.
Is Love Supposed to Hurt?
The short answer is: No, love – healthy, secure, trustworthy – love is not hurtful.
Of course, no person is perfect. It is incredibly common to have both experienced hurt and inflicted hurt in a close relationship.
Yet when we actively harm another person, this is not an expression of love.
Rather, hurting a person we love is an expression of fear.
When we actively seek to hurt the person we love, we are not acting out of love. We are acting out of a desire to defend or protect ourselves.
And when we allow others to harm us that we love (especially as a pattern), it highlights a fear of being alone, abandoned, or rejected.
The Science of Relationships
Attachment theory is the science that explains how we most feel comfortable showing up in our relationships – and having others show up for us.
Comfort, though, does not always translate to something that feels good in the context of human psychology. Rather our primal brain registers things that feel familiar as safe even if this isn’t logically true.
For instance, if you grew up in a home where expressions of love were absent or inconsistent, you may naturally believe that love is supposed to hurt sometimes.
A person who grew up never hearing, “I love you,” will naturally equate coldness with close relationships for example. Or a person who was constantly criticized by a parent, will naturally think being verbally picked apart is how people show love.
Or on the flipside, a person who was ignored growing up, may naturally equate being controlled by their partner (even as it harms them) with love.
We Need Close Relationships But May Not Have a Supportive Template
We all need close relationships with other people. This is a non-negotiable human need even as it has been minimized, or judged as “codependent,” culturally.
Our biology needs to be close to others. Research shows, for example, that loneliness has the same equivalent negative impact on our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
To support this, one meta-analysis, found that poor social relationships (which include loneliness and isolation), lead to a 16% increase of incidents of cardiovascular disease.
But sometimes, we don’t have the template for love to consistently feel nurturing or safe even as we need to be close to others.
When we have enough experiences growing up, even if they didn’t seem that bad, which reinforce that others aren’t always reliable, safe, or trustworthy, we develop an attachment style that leads to pain and inner conflict in relationships. We naturally want to be close to others but for some of us, we don’t know how to do this consistently in truly safe, nurturing ways.
An Anxious or Avoidant Template Makes Love Seem it’s Supposed to Hurt
An anxious attachment style, for instance, leads people to be terrified of being alone, abandoned, or rejective. For them, “love” naturally hurts because they will lose themselves in their relationships. An anxiously attached person is much less likely to set healthy boundaries when someone they love does harm them out of the fear of being alone.
On the other hand, an a person with an avoidant attachment style, perceives needing others as “weakness,” or a liability. They tend to override their innate need for closeness due to this judgment. Here they will avoid closeness by working too much or creating other excuses. A partner will naturally protest this lack of emotional availability. The person with avoidant attachment may then see this as confirmation that they must keep walls up to not be suffocated by their partner. But this creates pain both within them and the relationship. The denial of the natural need for closeness inevitably leads to conflict.
True Love Uplifts You – It’s Not Supposed to Hurt
When we cultivate secure attachment, we can experience love in its true form: as a safe haven in life.
When we have a secure base with our partner, the relationship is a source of comfort, and respite, from the world at large. A secure base allows our relationship to be a consistent soft place to land rather than another source of angst or pain in life.
To have this secure base, Sue Johnson who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, explains there must be:
- Mutual emotional accessibility,
- Trust,
- Responsiveness,
- Engagement,
- Safety and
- Contact
In a healthy relationship, you feel seen, valued, respected and content most of the time.
Author and therapist, Wendy Behary, explains,
“A healthy relationship is a reciprocal one whereby both members feel accurately seen and carried in the mind of the other. Where both parties feel safe and trusted. Where no one has to prove their worth. Where both parties graciously attend to the bids for love and understanding.”
Your partner does not actively cause you harm in a healthy relationship. Of course, inadvertently, all people make mistakes and can be offensive but it’s not intentional or consistent in a healthy relationship. Secure love never makes you question your worth or your reality.
The Secure Base of Healthy Love
Of course, people aren’t perfect. And even in the healthiest relationships, we disappoint and offend each other.
But research shows we can look at this mathematically. All couples have negative interactions but healthy couples, have 20 positive interactions to every 1 negative interaction. Even when they argue, these couples have 5 positive interactions to every 1 negative interaction. (In an argument, positive interactions include validating your partner’s feelings and taking accountability for your actions.)
When a relationship is truly loving, we are not left consistently hurting. Pain may come and go at various times like waves in the ocean. However, in a healthy relationship, pain is not the standard experience. Rather, it’s the exception that makes the rule.
In these safe relationships, we trust our partner to be kind, reliable, and care about us.
Love, in a healthy relationship, is closely tied to trust. When we can trust another person, fundamentally, we know they have our best interest in mind.
Cultivating a Relationship that Nurtures Rather than Harms
If you have confused love with frequent pain, or chaos, please know this is completely understandable and rooted in the hardwiring of what it means to be human. Try to show yourself understanding and kindness.
Also, rather than endlessly asking “why” you have confused love with pain, it’s more helpful to focus on resolving this. To experience love as a safe haven, you simply need to cultivate secure attachment.
Of course, we may not always be able to do this with another person. If your partner is unwilling to do the work with you, or you are single, you may still cultivate security from within.
Also, cultivating internal security, allows you to better cope with the vulnerability inherent to love. When we have non-secure attachment, we try to cope with the reality that love involves a painful vulnerability (as loss happens even in the happiest relationships), with clinging or detachment. But with internal security, we may cope with this fear and pain bravely.
Implementing the Strategy: Your Next Steps
While your mind may have conflict around “needing” others, your biology knows this is an essential human need. To show yourself kindness, you can cultivate secure attachment to honor this need in nourishing, safe ways.
To begin cultivating security, here are the next steps:
- **Take the Relationship Safety Assessment:** If you haven’t identified your specific score, start here. This data will allow you to better understand your personalized next steps.
- The DIY Path: If you are ready to begin incrementally make progress on your own to resolve your attachment style, The Toxic Relationship Recovery Workbook: Understand and Heal Attachment Wounds, Reclaim Your Confidence, and Build the Healthy Relationships You Deserve, provides clinical exercises to become securely attached.
- The Comprehensive Library: Access the Confidently Authentic Resource Library for practical and clinical skills to implement healthy boundaries, reduce negative inner dialogue, and communicate more effectively.
- The Strategic Private Partnership: For individuals ready to move beyond self-help into a permanent systemic solution to feel secure no matter what others choose to do (or not do). You may work directly with author and relationship expert, Krystal Mazzola Wood, to heal anxious or insecure attachment.
Whatever path you choose is best for you, we are rooting for your security here at Confidently Authentic!
At Confidently Authentic, we believe relationship transformation is a human lived experience requiring a human expert approach. All these articles are written from a human being with 15 years of clinical experience.
