Where There is Love, There is Pain?

Where there is love, there is pain? Love, like many things, is undoubtedly complex and to define it would be impossible due to its subjectivity. We are told in forms of media and through social norms that love is supposed to be this true, authentic experience-regardless of the fact that no one experiences love the same way. A poetic Spanish proverb stated that “Where there is love, there is pain”. I believe that in order to be strong while in love, we must first become vulnerable and susceptible to pain. Love makes us strong because you cannot truly feel pain if you have not first felt happiness. True love can makes us vulnerable in a multitude of ways. For example, the brain of a person in love and that of someone on cocaine, have many of the same areas stimulated. They both act on lowering the threshold of your pleasure centers, making everything you do feel a lot better that it would have had you not been in love, slightly altering our perception of reality, thus making us more vulnerable. The protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”, Holden Caulfield, says “[Girls-] You fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.” While love may make us “crazy” and weak, love also makes us stronger. When you genuinely love another person, you want to develop into the best possible version of yourself. John Steinbeck discussed in his novel, “The Pearl” how “. . . that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more.” (Chapter 10). While that may be interpreted as how humans are greedy and our pursuit of happiness is nothing but a mental drive to acquire more and more, it can also be said that humans are never satisfied because we need to progress as a species and make ourselves stronger. Even medical science has proven that patients in the most critical condition heal faster and more consistently when there is someone