Love hurts.

[steve25805 121,274]

Love can feel great. It can feel wondeful. It can make you feel young again when your youth is already a receding memory. And if you find the right person and settle down with him/her and live happily ever after, then that is surely wonderful.

But love can be painful too. It can hurt. And partly due to the traumas emanating from an abusive childhood, I am very defensive when it comes to exposing myself to the kind of pain that love can bring. If it starts hurting me too much, my feelings, however intense, shut down, and I retreat back into my emotional castle and pull up the ramparts and just stop caring. I have always been an emotional loner in this way, never had a long term relationship, never had kids, and I don't even know what loneliness feels like because I have honestly never felt it. Whenever I have - against my better judgement - let love into my life because I get to know someone special, I aways end up getting hurt in the end.

So I am a strange fish, capable of deep compassion and empathy and becoming very close to people whom I regard as lovely people, and yet with a little too much pain or trauma my feelings can shut down just like that as some kind of automatic defence mechanism.

Maybe I have never met the right person, but for me love has always ended painfully which is why I prefer to remain single and an emotional loner all my life, and any sexual experiences will probably have to be limited to the "friends with benefits" type scenarios.

I suppose I am in many ways damaged by my past, but I am the way I am and approaching 50 I am unlikely to change now.

Anyway, yes, love can hurt. I think we all know that. And whilst my own reactions to that might be kind of exceptional, I am interested in whatever insights anyone else might have to the joy and pleasure but also potential pain that love can bring. How do the rest of you deal so easily with the pain and bounce back so quickly again, just as ready and eager to find love as before? I tend to retreat into my emotional shell for years, and it takes someone special to even begin to prise that open again.

[AngelGirl 92]

Love is one of the strangest emotions of all, I've always thought. It can bring so many good and beautiful feelings, but it can also bring more pain than any other emotion. When we find the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with, our soul mate, our partner and our best friend, love is an incredible feeling. When we love someone who hurts us or does not love us back, love can be so painful you have no idea how you will get through it.

I've felt both sides of love, as many people probably have. I was incredibly blessed to meet my soulmate and my now fiancé on another pee fetish site... Of all the members there, he chose to message me and lo and behold, we discovered we lived just a half hour away from each other! We met up, and from the first date, we both knew we would end up together forever. At the time, I was only 18, and was dealing with some emotional issues, but he looked past all that, he saw beauty in me when I couldn't see any, he loved me for who I was and the way I was. He too was still struggling with a breakup from his ex-fiancée who had cheated on him, and we had both had suicidal thoughts in the past. We worked together though, we loved and taught how to love, we got past our hurt and anger and confusion over our pasts and we built our love into a beautiful, perfect feeling that it is today, two and a half years later, and I couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life with anyone else.

I've also felt the painful side of love. I was abused emotionally and sexually when I was 17, by a relative whom I thought I could love and trust. He shattered my whole world and I felt alone, helpless and broken. It was shortly after this, as I struggled to recover, that I met my now fiancé, who helped me so much, as mentioned above, but it definitely took a very special man to love me as I was. I learned then that I'd never be able to love in the way that other people do, I'd always have trust issues and certain little fears based on what is experienced in the past. I thought I'd never love or trust again, and indeed it took a while of online chatting before I'd even agree to meet my now fiancé. I considered myself to have gotten all I could possibly want in terms of love after this, until I started chatting with another guy online shortly afterwords.

No, this isn't a "I cheated on my fiancé" story, this is about how love also hurts. This man I met online was from overseas from me, and knew I was attached already. I hadn't thought it was possible to become close to another man, after how difficult it was with my fiancé at first, but I surprised myself by quickly becoming very attached and developing strong feelings of affection for him. He too had a troubled past, so we related well to each other and were good for each other, almost like long distance soulmates. Our relationship over the past two years was as perfect online as mine with my fiancé was in real life. We shared everything, we talked late into the night, we knew each other's deepest secrets. We loved each other as friends and as online soulmates. Sadly, we both just had too many issues from our past, and recently, we broke off our friendship, ending on a very bitter note. I was too quick to jump to conclusions and judge him, he was too quick to get angry and say hurtful things. Two years of love and caring I hadn't thought possible of someone I'd never met, just gone like that.

After this relationship ended, I stepped back and took a good hard look at myself and why, despite being able to have other friends online and in real life, as well as an amazing relationship with my fiancé, my relationship with my online soul mate had failed. We'd both loved each other deeply, but our insecurities, our pasts, our fears and emotional walls to prevent ourselves from being hurt as we'd been hurt before had just proven to be too much for us and I realized he'd never really cared for me after all, just thought he did. Love hurts, and hurts deeply.

Still, I think the good feelings of love far outweigh the bad ones. I'm incredibly lucky to have the people in my life I do have, the ones who really care about me, and I'm learning to let my life take its own course instead of struggling to make it perfect. I think the way I bounce back from the pain of broken love is simply to tell myself it wasn't true love anyway, and to be grateful for those I have who do love me and grateful I no longer have someone who only hurt me all the time in my life.

(Wow, that was deep and rambling! Sorry, all.)

[steve25805 121,274]

I was hurt and I was angry and I was scared of being hurt some more so I tried to retreat back into my shell and block out my feelings. But it didn't work. I loved you too much, Angelgirl. My love was always real, and it is too powerful now for me to just walk away from.