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Don’t Buy the Common Lie
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to encourage anyone to stay in an abusive or dangerous relationship. If you are being abused, seek shelter. Seek help. I read for the umpteenth time the other day, “Love’s not supposed to hurt.”
I am fed up with that nonsense. Sick and tired of it. I understand the phrase when used in context of abuse. If you mean, “Lovers aren’t supposed to intentionally hurt the ones they love,” fine. But if you mean to drive someone from a relationship, or encourage them to end one because love hurts, then shut up and sit down. You don’t know a thing about love. You think love is about what you get out of a relationship. You think love is all about your gains and your benefits and your feelings.
It is not.
Love hurts.
Sometime, that is about all it does.
Love hurts because love gives. It doesn’t just contribute what is convenient. It doesn’t just hit “yes” on the iPad at checkout and leave a little tip. Love gives from the gut, the heart, from the shoes up. Love gives what it has and then borrows more so it can keep giving. It gives and gives and when it is exhausted and beyond its wits end, it gives more.
That hurts.
Jesus illustrated, demonstrated, and set the bar for love, and the Apostle John put it this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
My in-laws demonstrated the kind of love I am talking about when they came to the rescue of this young, impetuous, foolish man who found himself in a financial wreck, the kind most never get to. They borrowed money from a family member to rescue me. They set the bar for me, and I have never forgotten it, and I will never stop being grateful for that kind of sacrificial love. They could have lectured. They could have thrown their hands up in disgust. They could have counseled their daughter to get out of my life and leave me to stew in my juices.
Instead, they chose the hard road and sacrifice of love, believing it would pay off in the end.
Come with me to California in the 1980s and find us in Palo Alto, learning and paying the cost of love.
There, love sits up around the clock, never leaving our daughter’s side after she has undergone a 12-hour surgery to reconstruct her back. Love sits day after day in the Ronald McDonald house, trying to find rest, praying for the best. Love sits up night after night in the Stanford University Medical Center. Week after week, bone-weary, bleary-eyed, putting on a strong face, soothing fears, love is there.
Ask my cousin and his wife if love hurts.
On December 31, 2024, their oldest son was in a bonfire accident and suffered second and third degree burns over 80% of his body. He spent 100% of 2025 in the burn unit at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas. He is still there as of this writing. For more than a year, that man has been hospitalized while skin is grown and grafted. Surgery after surgery is performed to rebuild him. He sufferes through pain like you can’t imagine. Trauma to the spirit, body, and mind. And right there, day after day, his parents are by his side. They have spent the year working, eating, sleeping, and tending to their son. That’s it. That’s their life.
Love hurts.
Love drags itself out of bed to wake the rooster and milk the cow. Love works the graveyard shift. Love swings a hammer and drives nails. Love chases storms for weeks on end. Love paints houses. Love does the laundry. Love takes out the trash. Love listens to the same story a hundred times like it is the first time it’s ever been told. Love laughs at Dad jokes. Love tells Dad jokes. Love sings, “This little piggy went to market.” Love cheers the tee ball kid who runs to third base first. Love changes diapers. Love pops pimples. Love picks up the tab. Love offers grace.
Love stays, dadgum it. Love isn’t looking for a way out but a way through. Love STAYS when everything else leaves.
Love defined.
If you want to understand love, to know its tendencies, traits, and trademark features, then consult the greatest definition of love ever written. Ever. Written.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13:4–8 (Berean Standard Bible)
Love hurts. Love anyway, because there is nothing in this world more rewarding—or rewarded—than to love and to be loved.
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”
–Nature Boy, Eden Ahbez
We could speak of “many things, of fools and kings,” but the “greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
Love hurts, which is a small price to pay for the greatest thing you’ll ever own.
Look out for my official announcement of the release of Moonshine Love coming Just in time for Valentine’s Day. I believe it will become a treasure to those who love, and read, and love to read. And maybe some who don’t.
I love you.
Gene
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