5 Lessons Pain Taught Me About Love

“If there is love in your heart, it will guide you through your life. Love has its own intelligence.” ~Sadhguru

Love was something I craved for most of my life. I dreamed that one day, a person would come into my life, preferably a man, who would love me and save me from my painful suffering filled with emptiness and desperation.

Even when I was single, which I was quite often and for prolonged periods, I would fantasize about a perfect relationship with someone who’d understand and accept me even in my worst moments. I wanted a partner and a best friend.

When mister BIG wasn’t coming, I turned to my parents. I wished for a loving mom and dad—parents who would heal themselves and give me all that I felt I’d missed out on.

This led to unmet expectations and a series of disappointments and relationships in my life that were borderline abusive and unhealthy.

It all resurfaced and pushed me to my limits when I met another man. It was one of those situations where I knew it wouldn’t work out but proceeded anyway. He ended up returning to his previous relationship, and we remained friends. Or rather, I pretended to be a friend while secretly hoping things would change one day and we would live happily ever after.

After a year and a half of deliberately staying in this dynamic, feeling depleted and deeply depressed, our paths split, and I began healing myself. This time, for real.

I think that many of us hold the idea that love is beautiful. And although it is one of the most empowering emotions, love is also an emotion that brings pain. When we care about someone and they are struggling or hurting themselves, we feel pain. When we lose people we love, we feel pain. A willingness to love is a willingness to hurt.

But what if we are hurting because we don’t believe we are worthy of love? What if we are looking at love from a limited perspective?

It’s been a couple of years since I promised to change the relationship I had with myself. Seeing what the desperation to be loved made me do, I got quite scared.

Throughout this time, I went through different stages of growth while addressing and looking at every relationship I’ve had, from my childhood through my marriage and divorce to the last encounter with a romantic relationship. Here are five lessons I learned about love.

1. Love can only exist within. 

A while back, I watched a video with a yogi named Sadhguru.

In the video, he asked, “Where do you feel pain or pleasure, love or hate, agony or ecstasy?”

The answer: only within.

Our emotions can’t be felt or created outside of our inner experience.

Growing up, I believed I could only feel and receive love from external sources. It didn’t occur to me that I could awaken this feeling without an outside presence since it is something I can only feel and create within.

This helped me realize that the love I was seeking had been with me all along, and there must have been a way to access it.

I decided to focus on my thoughts and overall perception of myself while questioning every belief that told me I wasn’t worthy of love. Then, I would dissect these beliefs while intentionally looking for evidence that they weren’t true.

I focused on pleasurable things and people who I loved and adored. I could see that any time I focused on the sweetness and kindness of my environment, my emotional state became pleasant.

2. Love is always available. 

Love is always available, and you can feel it if you choose to.

Since I know this is a bold statement, try out this experiment.

Close your eyes and bring to your awareness someone you love dearly. Maybe it is your child, a puppy, or someone else. You can see something they do that you absolutely love and cherish or simply think of their presence. Focus all your attention on this vision, fully immerse yourself, and stay with it for at least three to five minutes.

Then open your eyes and check with yourself how you feel. Do you feel that the sweetness of your emotions has increased?

And all you did was close your eyes and work with your imagination. I am not suggesting you should go live on an abandoned island all by yourself. But as you can see, love is within you, and you can access it through simple exercises like this one.

3. Love doesn’t guarantee happiness. 

At the beginning of my recovery, I had to face a question: “What do I expect to gain from others offering me their love?”

I realized that I never went into any relationship with the idea of giving but, rather, taking. I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Well, I am overflowing with goodness and joy, and I want to share it with someone.”

Instead, I was looking to fulfill a need. Whether it was in a relationship with my parents or different men in my life, I was looking for a payoff.

When it didn’t come, my starving soul would throw a tantrum. Since I didn’t have a healthy relationship with myself, I naturally attracted relationships that reflected that.

Often, we go into relationships looking for something. Whatever our intention is, we unconsciously hope to receive love to make us feel better and happier.

Initially, we may feel ‘it’ as the dopamine of a new relationship floods our nervous system. But eventually, as the excitement from the newness subsides, we are back to our old challenges, with the persistent longing for something more while missing the fact that it only and always exists within all of us.

4. Self-love doesn’t always feel good at first.  

When we say the word love, it has a soft and pleasant connotation. Therefore, when we look at the fact that, let’s say, setting boundaries is an act of self-love, it doesn’t quite fit our ideology because it can evoke discomfort.

This one was hard for me to accept. I thought that loving myself should always feel good. So, when I did positive things for myself and felt the fear of rejection or worried that others wouldn’t understand or accept me, something that the unhealed part of me struggled with, I felt uncomfortable and scared.

Eventually, I learned that love goes way deeper, beyond immediate pleasure or comfort.

Sometimes self-love means setting boundaries, standing up for yourself, looking at your toxic traits, speaking your truth, saying no, loving some people from a distance, or putting yourself first.

It’s about respecting yourself enough to honor your needs and well-being, even if it means someone else is displeased.

5. Loneliness results from disconnection. 

When I was married, I felt lonely. Then I got divorced, and the loneliness was gone. Eventually, I got into another relationship and felt lonely again. After I broke it off, loneliness disappeared again.

This dynamic got me curious.

Typically, we expect to feel lonely when we are alone. But I realized that loneliness isn’t about other people’s presence but rather the connection we have with ourselves.

Since I was staying in abusive and toxic situations, I knew I was betraying myself. But because I ignored it and denied it, I was naturally disconnected from who I was and what I was worth. And that brought painful feelings of loneliness.

On the other hand, when I stood up for myself and left the situation that was hurting me, my higher self understood that I was taking a healthy step and led me back to myself. This is when loneliness started to dissipate.

At the time of this writing, I am choosing to be single. I feel that for the first time, I am truly taking care of myself and honoring my worth and value—things that were so foreign to me all my life.

I see this as a time of deep recovery and healing while peeling away every layer of past conditioning and trauma. Seeing that love is always available to all of us, I am beginning to understand that who I am, where I am, and what I do are and always were enough.

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Although approaching emotional pain will always be a challenge for me, I am beginning to see that my pain was never meant to make me suffer. Instead, it showed me the love I was capable of feeling and taught me how I can use it to heal myself.

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