Love Shouldn’t Hurt

“When you were not fed love off a silver spoon,
you learned to lick it off knives..”

• Often attributed to Lauren Eden, a contemporary poet known for her raw and evocative writing. However, as with many viral quotes on the internet, the exact origin is sometimes debated. Eden’s work frequently explores themes of love, pain, and resilience, making it likely that she penned this line or something similar in her poetry.

Those who were not given much love as children grow up learning that love is a thing to be earned, a thing to be survived. They do not expect it to come freely, nor do they recognize it as something soft and nourishing. Instead, they learn that love is
a trial, a test of endurance.
If, as little ones, they were met with coldness, neglect, or cruelty, they come to believe that love must be something hard-edged, something that wounds.
“When you are not fed love off a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives.”
And so, when love comes to them later in life, sharp and unforgiving, they do not recoil. When it arrives in the form of hands that do not hold but take, voices that do not soothe but cut, they do not run.
No, somewhere deep in the bones, in the marrow of their very being, they recognize this as love, because it is the only kind
they have ever known.
They accept being hurt, used, abandoned, believing that love must cost something, must be paid for in suffering. They will stay in the arms of those who wound them, mistaking pain for passion, mistaking control for care. They will justify mistreatment, tell themselves that if they endure enough, they will finally be worthy. They will call the sharp edges of someone else’s indifference “fate.”
They will call the aching loneliness of an imbalanced love “devotion.”
But this is not love. This is a hunger that has never been satisfied, an old wound that has never been soothed. And those who have survived this pattern must one day awaken to the truth: Love does not have to hurt.
Love is not a thing to be chased, bargained for, or endured at the cost of the self. Love, real love, does not come with conditions written in suffering.
For those who have only known love as a wound, there is another way.
A slow, quiet way.
A way where love does not demand their pain, but rather,
their presence. Where love does not ask them to bleed,
but to bloom.

#powertopulse