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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Love may hurt, but it can heal just as well

My niece got married last week. She walked down the aisle of the candlelit chapel, resplendent in ivory lace. She was a vision of beauty and elegance. As she and the groom repeated their vows, distinct sounds of sniffling echoed through the room.

It was hard to find a dry eye in the crowd gathered to celebrate the love and commitment of this young couple. People always cry at weddings. It’s a bittersweet rite of passage. Sweet because new love is filled with hope and promise, and bitter because most have us have discovered love hurts.

You won’t see that emblazoned on the invitations or the napkins, and you probably won’t find those words on any Valentine, but it’s an inescapable fact. The minute you open your heart to someone, you risk having it broken.

So some tiptoe around the edges of love. Like wary tourists at the ocean they keep their feet firmly planted in the sand. They watch from the shore as others happily splash in the waves, while they tentatively dip just a toe in the tide.

Others are like grazers at a banquet, sampling a smidgen of love here, a morsel of passion there, and then pushing their plates away – preferring to go hungry, though there’s a feast spread out before them.

Love hurts.

Just ask my friend whose wife has Alzheimer’s. The disease has stolen her recollection of 60 years of marriage. He is the keeper of memories as he cares for her in their home. Each morning he helps her dress. He carefully combs her hair, and every time she looks at him and says, “Thank you, dear. What was your name again?” – his heart breaks.

Love hurts.

Each morning in the public records section of the newspaper you can read accounts of relationships that started out as fairy tales but faded before the happily ever after. They’re not long narratives. Just two names – two lives that were once connected, now separated. Couples who’ve discovered the warm passion they once shared has cooled to a desolate wasteland.

And yet just above those listings are the names of couples who’ve obtained marriage licenses. For every snarky cynic who scoffs at the idea of lasting love, there’s a starry-eyed optimist willing to risk.

Love requires us to make a choice. We can choose to cloak ourselves in desperate self-protection. We can allow our failures and those of others to make us bitter. Or we can let pain soften us, let it crack icy layers of self-interest. We can choose to venture out into the deep without a life preserver, and hope that for every wave that breaks over our heads and threatens to pull us under, another will come along and buoy us up.

What I would tell my newly married niece this Valentine’s Day is this: love hurts. It can break your heart. But the heart is incredibly resilient. The very thing that can break it – is also the only thing that can heal it.