Why Is Love So Hard? | Major Reasons & Is Love Worth It?


It’s easy to fall in love but difficult to do it right. Neither was love supposed to be flawless nor ever it will be. True love is where you see the flaws in a person but still love them for who they are.

Love is hard because we are unable to adapt to situations and people. Our ego stands in our way and makes things complicated. And if we do adjust, we go to the extent of compromising our values and ignore the red flags in a person. We have unrealistic expectations from love.

Love is not what you see in the movies or on T.V. where everything is idealistic. Real-life love will sometimes irritate you, frustrate you and demand continuous nurturing through time, effort, and emotions.

Reasons Why Love Is So Hard

Here are some of the most common reasons why people feel love is so hard:

1. Love Is Not Always Reciprocated

It is said that true love should be selfless and come without conditions.

But when most of us love someone, we want our love to be reciprocated and expect an outcome like a happy ending.

We want the other person to feel the same for us like we do for them. If they do not reciprocate with the same intensity, we get hurt.

The pain is unbearable, and we feel stupid for trying.

Remember that there is a person in front of you and not a mirror who is supposed to emulate whatever you do or feel.

Give the person you love a blank canvas to portray their understanding of love. Don’t expect them to replicate how you see love.

Love Is Not Always Reciprocated

2. You Cannot Bend Love In The Direction You Want

When we fall in love with someone, we come with our preconceived notions and expectations. In our heads, it is all planned perfectly.

What being with the person will be like, how they will appreciate you for everything, how you’ll have a family and grow old together are some of the common scenarios we imagine almost every day.

In short, you try to trap love in a box and want it to dance to your tunes.

But then you’re hit hard by reality, and your experience is nowhere close to your expectations. Love will never go the way you want it to.

And that’s where the beauty of it lies. Else, love would become so mundane and predictable. It can’t be all sunny and rosy.

There will be ups and downs, due to which loving a person will be extremely challenging sometimes. You will feel lost, but you’re not alone, and it is normal.

If you want love to work, give it gentle nudges to make it glide in the direction you wish to when things aren’t how you’d like them.

Trying to put a leash on it will only make you frustrated. Also, see love like a tree. If the tree isn’t growing straight, we correct it by staking it when it’s still young.

No arborist tries to straighten a thick trunk. Getting your expectations right early on is crucial.

3. The Struggle In Love Is Constant

We feel happy and complete when our love is reciprocated. But for those whose love is returned in kind, it doesn’t mean their struggle is any less.

There are infinite challenges that love brings, and anything that can go wrong will go wrong sooner or later.

There will be situations where the person you love may not connect with you on a deeper level as they did earlier.

Communication gaps, misunderstandings, fights, and a lot less romance will only add to your woes.

Then the struggle to get the person you love on the same page as you might seem impossible, and you’ll be repeatedly disappointed.

But then there will be beautiful moments too. This push and pull, this struggle, is sometimes exactly what keeps love going.

4. People Have Flaws

We always think of love as something surreal and out of the world.

We have this idea that everything in our life will suddenly turn into a beautiful dream when we find our true love or the right person.

What we fail to understand is that such unrealistic expectations bring nothing but disappointment.

We fall in love with the idea of a perfect relationship with a person rather than the person itself.

Real love and people come with all their flaws, difficulties, and imperfections. But we are supposed to find a way to coexist with the person despite the differences.

Of course, the caveat is that those differences should not be dealbreaking to the extent where our mental health suffers.

Expecting love to be perfect, placing it on a pedestal, and never coming out of our dream world is what makes love hard.

5. There Is No Guarantee In Love

There is no guarantee or a written agreement promising a lifetime of happiness. Despite all your efforts, your love may dump you one day.

This thought is enough to stop you from loving and giving everything in a relationship if you are familiar with the pain of a broken heart.

None of us want to waste our time and energy on something uncertain.

If you find yourself in doubt regarding the longevity of love, know that love may or may not last forever.

But the time you spend with that special someone and the memories you create will last a lifetime.

There Is No Guarantee In Love

6. Loving The Wrong Person

It often happens that people end up in a relationship with someone who is not right for them.

In such a scenario, you go through a hellish experience while trying to love the person.

That person may not even love you and but you still choose to stay in the hope of making things work.

In the end, you are left with nothing and feel stupid for not breaking up earlier. While in love, you make stupid decisions.

You fail to see the blatant problems in a person for a long time as you are blinded by your emotions and the hope for a better tomorrow.

Here, love is hard because you could not think logically.

7. Love Is Not Eternal Like We Believe

Feelings come with an expiry date.

Even those who grow old together hit a plateau at some point, after which it becomes difficult to carry on without making adjustments.

Adjustments made at the right time and in the right way prolong the life of love.

Alas, those who can’t eventually grow out of love.

Also, you might love someone forever, but there is no guarantee that the other person will also love you eternally.

Your love may lose interest in you later on in life and may even leave you for someone else.

It hurts to see the love of your life leave after being a part of your journey.

All the memories they leave behind stack up against you, and it breaks your heart to see your love fail.

8. Love Makes You Vulnerable

No one likes to be vulnerable. We all want to feel strong and in control. But, love has other plans for us.

It makes you weak and vulnerable around the one you love. You lose all your powers and surrender yourself to love. You let yourself loose when in love.

People often behave like children around their love because they expect so much. They want to be taken care of, caressed, and pampered.

To experience the magic of love, you must let your guard down and let the other person see you for who you are inside.

This leaves you prone to getting hurt. For some, this gamble works, while others regret opening up the gates to the castle of their heart.

9. You Have No Control Over Love

You might like to control everything, but when it comes to love, you will lose control no matter what.

Understand that you can’t control who you will love and how they will love you back.

Even factors like if or not they will love you and what kind of a person they will turn out to be are out of your reach.

Moreover, what course your life is going to take due to love is also beyond your control.

You can only go with the flow, and if you ever try to control it, you may suffocate the one you love.

They will demand their space and will leave you in search of it.

You Have No Control Over Love

10. Love Brings Others Into Your Decisions

When in love, everything is not only about you. Any and every decision you make will affect the two of you.

You shouldn’t make major decisions for your life on your own just because you can.

Anything you do will affect your partner’s life in ways you may not take into consideration.

You will always have to consider the feelings and the situation of the person you love.

Not being in charge and in total control of your life is what makes love even more difficult.

11. Love Is Emotionally Exhausting

For very emotional people, loving someone can become consume them from within.

They will always expect the other person to be equally invested in the relationship.

It becomes hard when they fall for someone who faces a hard time expressing their emotions or are emotionally unavailable.

Loving someone more practical than emotional can be very frustrating for an emotional person.

There will be constant disagreements and fights that will affect your mental health and ultimately lead to a breakup.

12. Love Requires Constant Efforts

You cannot claim to love someone and then lie dormant, expecting everything to fall in place.

Loving someone is not easy as a relationship requires continuous efforts to grow.

Love takes your time, energy, and just like taking care of a flower, you can’t expect love to bloom without nurturing it.

Initially, you put in lots of effort and go the extra mile for the love of your life. But after some time, you stop doing the extra and start taking love for granted.

You assume that things will always be the way they are. The crop of love will not grow without your gentle care.

You regularly need to express your love in different ways to keep things interesting.

It’s the little things you do every day that matter rather than one big gesture once in a while.

Once lost, trying to recreate love is equivalent to tying the snapped thread. You may tie the ends together, but there will always be an ugly knot.

13. You May Lose Others

When you are too engrossed in love, it becomes hard to keep up with the other aspects of your life.

You aren’t left with much time for friends and family.

Most people cannot manage their time well, and before they realize it, they drift away from their loved ones.

In the attempt to seek and find love, you often forget the people who actually matter.

These are the people who will love you and stand by you when nobody else will.

Don’t get so engrossed in the romanticized version of love that you forget that it exists in other forms too.

You May Lose Others

14. Love Demands Compromise

For maintaining peace, often, you’ll have to compromise. You can’t be stubborn and at the same time expect the other person to understand.

Love requires a give-and-take relationship, but it takes years to understand this little concept. By that time, most permanently damage their relationship.

If you want your love life to be free of continual arguments and fights, you must know when you should compromise and when you should not.

You also don’t want to become a foot mat and let your partner walk all over you. When in love, you cannot only think about what makes you happy.

Adapt your thought process to rather think about what will make both of you happy. You must find a middle ground to problematic situations.

And if you cannot compromise, love will always be hard for you.

15. Trust Issues Exist In Love

A person who finds it difficult to trust others will have a hard time loving someone else. Our insecurities give birth to trust issues, and they resurface frequently.

You have to tackle the negatives every single time. When you trust someone, you have to let your guard down and be vulnerable.

For many people, their past experiences don’t allow them to trust again. The history they have negatively affects their current relationship.

The only way out of this is to treat each person differently and not test them using the parameters from your past.

But, howsoever simple the solution may seem, it is easier said than done when you have emotional scars.

16. Love Expects Commitment

One-sided love might seem like a fancy concept in a movie, but it can devastate you in real life.

Waiting selflessly for the person you love to come back to you is good for preaching but not practical.

Realistic love is very selfish, and you want to be with the person you love in a committed relationship.

You feel like making the person yours forever. But commitment is often elusive.

It is one thing to say that you are in a committed relationship with a person but an altogether different thing to believe in it.

Sadly, most people only say it. Now, commitment can be an issue for both sides.

It can be really frustrating for you if you are ready to commit to a relationship, but the person you are with doesn’t.

Similarly, you might love a person but not be able to commit to them due to certain situations while they, on the other hand, strongly expect it from you.

17. Betrayal Makes Love Even Harder

One of the major reasons why love is hard is deceit from a loved one. You seek loyalty from your love and trust them with all your heart.

It breaks you into pieces when someone you sacrificed so much for betrays you.

Not only it makes you lose your faith in others and love itself, but you might not be able to come out of the trauma for a long time.

People often waste precious years of their life alone just because they don’t have the strength to love someone else again.

Loving someone again with the same intensity becomes almost impossible once your love cheats on you.

Betrayal Makes Love Even Harder

Is Love Worth It?

Love is every bit worth it. We are incomplete without love, even if it comes with all its difficulties. Without a deep emotional connection with that special someone, life can be pretty bland. We cannot share everything with friends and family. Love gives us hope when there is none.

1. Being In Love Makes You Happier

Being in love fills us with immense happiness. Only love has the power to give you that tingly butterfly sensation in your stomach.

Even if scientists boil love down to chemical reactions in the brain, we still see it as something mythical and divine.

Happiness is not only about feeling good but also the absence of bad feelings. Love also counters bad feelings.

Thus, love works from both ends on increasing happiness in our life.

Whether it’s through the happiness of having someone to talk to, share everything about it, or laughing together, love keeps our spirits alive.

Having someone out there thinking about us and waiting for us to call, text, or see them is a privilege not many have.

2. Love Brings Care With It

In our busy lives, while chasing our dreams and goals, there are times where we get so tired and lonely that we wish if only there were someone who cared about us.

Achieving something big and coming back to an empty house is one of the biggest disappointments in the world.

Where’s the fun in a victory if you have no one to share it with? Sometimes, we might feel like why are we even going back home?

True, that your family can also revel in your victory, but it is not the same as sharing it with a romantic someone.

We often want someone to talk to and share our feelings with. Being pampered and cared for is one of the best feelings in the world.

Love reduces stress, and talking to your love makes you calmer and helps you feel light.

3. Love Guides You In Difficult Times

When we feel emotionally weak, love gives us the strength to become stable. It encourages you to keep fighting in life and not to quit.

Love inspires you motivates you in times of weakness. It also helps you think differently and resolve issues with a warm heart.

Why? Because love is like a fire, and it spreads warmth wherever it exists. Love brings out the best in you.

4. Love Makes You A Better Person

Love teaches you a lot about life. Without love, our vision is narrow and selfish. Love teaches us to look beyond our own needs.

You become a much better person when you are in love. You learn the skills of adjustment and empathy.

Keeping someone else’s needs above yours is one of the most difficult things to do in the world. Our primal instincts do not allow us to do so.

But love makes you selfless. What won’t some people do just to bring a smile to their loved one’s face?

Love motivates you to become the best version of yourself, not only for your own good but also for those around you.

Love Makes You A Better Person

5. Love Gives Us A Sense Of Completeness

Love gives you this feeling of fulfillment. All our life, we keep looking for someone who understands us and accepts us for who we are.

Lucky are the ones who find someone to fill that role. They’re not wrong when people say that being in love feels like being on top of the world.

Love gives you the feeling of having everything and wanting nothing else from life. There is a sense of calm, safety, and security in love.

Conclusion

Loving someone can be hard sometimes, but you should never lose your faith in love.

When done right, it has the power to move mountains and come out of every situation. All the love you give will never go in vain.

It is only when you give that you receive tenfold. Never give up on love, else life will become dull and boring.

Be patient and keep spreading love and joy until you find the one who’ll admire the best in you. Now tell us your experience with love in the comments below.

Shashank Verma

A trained theatre actor and a STEM graduate who brings perspectives and methods from these worlds into dating and relationships. Also a big time Krav Maga enthusiast and practitioner.

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