Learning to Love to Hurt

Learning To Love To Hurt

We get up each morning to navigate through another day, to navigate through life. What drives this action? What makes us want to be alive? For some of us, for me, it’s likely to be the hope that today someone special crosses our path. Love. A word we all know, but almost never fully understand. However, people can be driven by many other desires…ambition, the pursuit of knowledge, peace. Yet at their core these are also manifestations of love…a love of success, understanding, harmony. So the key to understanding life is quite possibly a deeper understanding of love and how to pursue it…

Just the other day, a bunch of my friends and myself decided we should spend a relaxed day at the beach, but since our original plans were rained out, we chose to rather acquaint ourselves with the cocktail menu at a restaurant nearby. So, a couple of drinks down and slightly less inhibited, some genuine emotions rose to the surface.

One of my good friends, Miranda, was having some trouble with the opposite sex. I didn’t know the nature of their relationship at the time or the damage it was dealing her, but what I did know was that my usually bubbly, fun and enthusiastic friend was sad and in pain. After a bit of prodding and a little more alcohol, it turned out she was experiencing the disappointment of loving someone who chose not to reciprocate. She had her heart wrapped around someone who wasn’t willing to protect it in return, but who chose to rather drag it along for his own entertainment. I really felt like I understood what she was going through because, like so many others like us, I’ve had my own experience with a heart-hurter or two. In one situation I’d taken the time to really get to know someone I had good chemistry with, really opened myself up to them, did the thoughtful things I hoped would earn me their good graces and did my best to avoid what I deemed dating faux pas. And I still ended up crashing head-on into a wall…a wall of...