Why Does Love Hurt When It Goes Bad? The Truth You Need to Hear

As much as love makes you float in the skies, it can also put you down to the dumps just as quickly. Poets pine about the pain of love just as much as they croon about its beauty. For someone who enjoys love, it’s natural to fall in and out of love now and then.

But all of us know the fact that love does have its dark shades too.

Something that can give so much happiness can also take it all away in a few moments.

So where does this immense power of love come from, and why does love hurt so much even though we’ve learnt to handle it through our experiences?

Why does love hurt so much?

Love is a sensation, just like heat or cold.

We can’t see love or feel it outside our bodies like we can feel the breeze or the blazing sun on our skin.

But just like hunger or pain, love is a sensation that’s experienced in our brain.

Pain sears through your body when you are physically wounded. It’s a defense mechanism of your body to let you know that something’s not right somewhere. It’s also a warning signal from your mind to avoid such circumstances in future.

And just like that, love hurts for the same reasons too. It is your mind’s way to let you know that something’s not right inside you.

Five reasons why love hurts more than anything else

Love can hurt a lot emotionally. But almost always, love blends with other emotions that add to the painful sensation. Here are five most common emotions that get associated with love when it’s going bad.

#1 Fear

#2 Anger

#3 Helplessness

#4 Loneliness

#5 Jealousy [Read: Are you jealous of your ex?]

The bad side effects of bad love

Ever since the time humans have learnt to live in groups, we’ve been hardwired to interact socially and depend on other people, especially our loved ones. When a relationship starts to go bad, your dependency on a really close human bond is threatened and this sets off a panic button in your mind.

# Bad relationships cause more stress. You’ll get tired more easily and you’ll have a harder time coping with everyday affairs.

# Your mind is preoccupied. When love starts to hurt, you’d lose focus on other parts of your life.

# Social humiliation. When you’re experiencing a bad relationship or a break up, you’d feel like a loser. You may feel more vulnerable and helpless too. [Read: A break up on facebook leads to suicide]

Love by itself doesn’t create all that pain you feel, it’s all these other factors that would slowly accumulate over a few days and add to the heartache that can make you feel more miserable.

Things you do that makes love hurt more

While a break up or a rift in the relationship could trigger all the other side effects, there are a few things broken hearted lovers do that add to the pain and the misery.

#1 Isolating yourself from other people.

#2 Looking for ways to feel more miserable, by hurting yourself or reliving the bad relationship in your head.

#3 Getting intoxicated. A hangover will only make your head hurt more.

#4 Getting clingy and persistent even when you see no reciprocation from your lover.

#5 You avoid moving on even when you know that it’s your only option.

If you really want the pain of a bad romance to fade away, you have to put in an effort to move on instead of experiencing the sick satisfaction of feeling miserable all the time. [Read: Signs your ex is thinking about you]

Love can hurt just as much as physical pain

In a study conducted by the University of Michigan psychologist, Ethan Kross and Columbia University professors, Walter Mischel and Edward E. Smith on individuals who had recently broken up, it was seen through brain scans that the pain experienced through heartbreak was the same as pain experienced through physical pain.

Painful love does hurt a lot, even though you don’t see any signs of injury physically. The study revealed that your brain sees physical pain and the pain of a heartbreak in the same light. [Read: Ways to deal with a complicated relationship]

There is no way you can avoid the pain of love when it hurts, but you can choose to ignore it by keeping yourself occupied in other activities. And if you can do that, you’ll see that the pain will start to fade away sooner than you expected. [Read: How to stop thinking about someone you still like]

And if you want to completely remove the pain of a heartbreak, all you need to do is jump into another rebound relationship. It’ll fill your mind with happiness like a pleasure drug and make you forget all about your old lover who broke your heart. But that’s only if you’re willing to move on in the first place.

So why does love hurt so much? Well, it does because you choose to let the pain linger in your mind for so long that it accumulates other emotions and hurts you more. Make up your mind to move on, and the pain of love will be much easier to bear and overcome.