The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound. —Maureen Duffy—
We live in one another’s company. We grow to yearn for one another’s company at a deeper level.
The yearning reciprocated opens the way to a love relationship, a relationship both blessed and torn by intimacies. It’s human to long for love, to want to shower it and receive it. But the pain of waiting for it doesn’t match the pain that accompanies its arrival. Love heightens our sensitivities. Any separations, any discrepancies, physical or emotional, wound the partners in love. The pain that accompanies never having something is less than the pain of projected loss after its arrival. Love should bring only happiness, we mistakenly think. But love, giving it and receiving it, beckons us to bare our souls, to expose our hidden selves. The fear of rejection, the anxiety that we’ll be rejected “when they know the real me,” is large and looms over our shoulders. How lucky we are to have this program, these Steps, which if practiced in all our affairs will prepare us for love and loving. They will help us to live with the pain of love, knowing that it increases our humanity—that it deepens our awarenesses and thus heightens our appreciation of all of life. The pain of love increases my rapture.