
Why Does Love Hurt? How to Open your Heart and Feel Real Love
Hearts ache. Hearts break. We long for connection, even in a long term relationship. Why does love hurt so much?
Our capacity for love too often goes numb, and then even dormant. When we lose access to love, it hurts… and most of us feel those painful sensations of love in our heart.
Here I share lots of insights into “why does love hurt so much” and then later I share one powerful way you can have fullest richest experiences of love now… and forever more.
When we feel our heart aching, we want to close it. We want to keep the hurt out. Then we ask, in those desperate aching moments, “Why does love hurt?” Simply, it hurts because most of us never learned how love really works. We don’t know where it comes from or what makes it arrive or what makes it go. We feel out of control. We feel lost, confused and sometimes even betrayed by love.
The real challenge arises because we don’t know how to maintain those soulful, sometimes blissful, sometimes ecstatic, feelings of warmth, ease and acceptance. Worse than that, we usually think the problem with love starts in the other person. We see him or her as the source of both our love and our pain.
When we focus “out there” on what the other person does or doesn’t do, or when we don’t understand how love really works, we end up experiencing hurt after hurt after hurt. When we get hurt enough times, we start to close off and shut down our hearts.
Eventually, we forget how to love.
The Source of Heart Ache
Although it’s nice to think that we’ve put the past behind us, most of us really haven’t. In my work over almost two decades, I’d say the chances of meeting someone who is completely done with all of his or her past is 1 in a billion.
We may not want to admit it, but our past is constantly at work in the present, limiting our capacity for love. We lose access to love through the wounding of our past relationships, from parents who couldn’t see us, lovers who “discarded” us, by saying yes when we meant no, or saying no when we really wanted to say yes. Heartbreak, abandonment, betrayal, all coupled with fear, doubt and its associated judgments make lasting romantic love almost impossible.
And, here’s the great part… and the not-so-great part.
You are the block to love in your life. You are the reason love hurts.
I know that probably sucks to hear. Fortunately, even though you might not like it, that truth gives you power to change your romantic experience. If you are the reason love hurts, if you are the block to love itself, then you have ability and power to reopen and reignite love… more powerfully and deeply than ever before.
Our wounds, our fears, and even our hopes actually make the love we seek impossible to find, yet we keep searching… seeking the one who will soothe our aching heart. Or if we’ve “found someone,” we try to transform the one we love into the one who will make our heart a permanently blissful organ of joy. And, that never works. As a matter of fact, it causes a ton of breakups. You might think, “Oh, I’d never do that!” I’d bet you do. It happens so subtly most of us never see it, but we sure feel it when someone does it to us. Even if we can’t articulate what we’re feeling, and we’ll typically end up arguing over something insignificant.
Another familiar way some of us block love is to use our sexual union as a pseudo replacement for real love and intimacy. We imagine the pleasures of the body will make all things “right” but, again, it never works that way.
Blame is Never the Answer to “Why Does Love Hurt?’
We, myself included, fall into the human pattern of blaming what’s happening “out there” for our discomfort, hurt, misery, and emptiness “in here”. The form of the pain will look different for different people and in different moments… but the form doesn’t matter. If our heart feels anything but openness and connection, if love feels transient or painful, then it’s an immediate sign to go within and tend to our own heart.
We often think our partner, or date, “quits”, runs away, shuts down, when they won’t talk, connect, touch or make love with us. I used to ask, “Why can’t I find a man who will go deep with me?” I hear from singles all the time, “all the good ones who know how to communicate, who are conscious/healthy/attractive/(insert your word here) are taken.” When we’re single and really hurting, we say things like, “I don’t care. I don’t need love. It doesn’t matter if I never have another relationship.”
It’s all B.S. All the stories we tell ourselves, all the excuses we make up, keep us stuck in the misery. They keep us locked in the pain our our humanness, where love, joy and ecstasy continue to elude us.
Your Nature is Love
I said earlier that we don’t know the real source of love. We think finding our soulmate will send all of our love woes sailing away. Nope. Finding our soulmate will simply bring us a new set of woes, until we truly understand the source of love.
Your nature, your divine nature, is love. You are love.
I know that can sound woo-woo. The engineer in me argued with the thought too. And, it’s true.
Love lives in you. Love never leaves. Never. Ever. You only think it does when you close your heart.
Your job, when it comes to love, is to…
remove every obstacle, every obscuration to love that keeps your heart closed, protected or numb.
You, and only you, can awaken and activate the love and passion you desire to share with another.
It is only you that can activate your heart and open it to the flow of loving and being loved. No one else is required. It’s an inside job.
It’s no one else’s responsibility to invite you out to play or make it safe for you to reveal yourself.
I might be irritating you with these words. They pissed me off. I ran from them and suffered immensely for it, creating more pain than love in the world for myself and others.
I was sure I’d find love when I found my soulmate. I was sure that if we both just loved enough… if I found the guy with all the right qualities, I’d finally know this deep love I longed for. I wasted decades in the search.
If you can take a deep breath in and consider the possibilities, you just might discover a love you never knew existed… a love so powerful… it’s heartbreaking… in a VERY GOOD way.
Love is truly up to you. It’s up to you to find and reveal the love within you so that it may be met by another in the dance of relationship.
It is not the relationship that makes love possible. It is the love, awake and shining in you, that makes relationship possible.
The human perception of how love works couldn’t be more wrong, couldn’t be more “screwed up”. And, it’s costing every individual and our planet so much pain… waaaaay too much pain.
One by one, as one individual after another finds and activates his or her soul’s love, then and only then, can real union exist – only then can ecstatic ecstasy be experienced.
Are you one of the truly soulful men and women who MUST find and become the source of love… so that you can feel and experience true intimacy and ecstasy in your body, your life, and beyond?
Then you are receiving a savings on a 1-on-1 private session. Schedule an Igniting Soul Love Session and use Promo Code: BLOGGIFT. Together we’ll jumpstart your love life by identifying the very best next steps you can take on your Path of Soul Love.
And, if not that, then may your heart, your mind, your body, your spirit and your soul come together in sacred union to open the door to a love that is truly everlasting.
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In love, light and ecstasy,

*At Ecstatic Intimacy, an all-inclusive website for singles and couples, we welcome all sexual orientation(s), gender(s) and relationship expressions. In this article we utilize the pronouns he/she/him/her.
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thnk u
This was a great article. I think the most promising message was the phrase “your nature is love.” For me, meditation is the vehicle that gets me there. It makes me wonder why many men, or some men, join monasteries, and devote their love for God. It seems like a viable option considering the energy and frustration involved in having a loving relationship with a woman…or even finding one that is available and ready to take the leap. I have been with many women…I made mistakes as well. I was also married for 17 years….most of it good…that ended tragically. Despite all this experience, I have been single for 17 years and celibate for 8 years. I do not know why. It is not something I wanted but it never ends. The vaccine issue has made it even more difficult to meet unvaccinated women…who have the brains not to put that poison into their body. I have no answers only to say that life, my life, is a bitch, I’m as evolved as a human as any women I’ve ever met. My heart is open, but life is still a bitch…..and after numerous dates, she is nowhere to be found.