See love as learning, healing; not just heartache, pain

BENGALURU : A heartbreak, scientists have proven, causes us to feel as much as pain as a physical heart attack. It even has the sinister sounding name of ‘Tako Tsubo cardio-myopathy,’ or more simply, the broken-heart syndrome. The person is in major distress, and there is that intolerable pain in one’s chest, and yes – there is a real physical damage possible to the heart even though one’s arteries might be clean as a whistle, ECGs regular and nothing might have indicated a potential for such pain. People recover from it, of course, but yes – the broken heart syndrome is real.

Love hurts, or at least, has the potential to hurt. The pain of losing someone you love is an awful, awful pain. It is bad when your lover leaves you quite unexpectedly for someone else, or just like that. It is worse when your loved one dies or is hurt, and all that love has nowhere to go.The hurt and pain is so much that often times, it scares one to imagine it. Some people come to fear loving itself for fear of the pain possibly hiding in the wings. The only true way to not ever face the pain from love, after all, is to never love at all. But then again, all it does is to leave you in another sort of pain – a dull ache, a loneliness that eats you up from the inside.

Scientists have proven that loneliness may lead to serious illnesses, including cancer. No – not the same scientists who studied the broken-heart syndrome, this is from researchers from UCLA who actually proved that chronic loneliness can actually trigger changes in gene activity that affected antibody production and anti-viral responses. Feelings of happiness and love cause our body to flood with cortisol and oxytocin, and their findings were that without these, something happens to our immune system. 

Is our choice then between heart-attacks and cancer? Are we doomed to be hurt? Are we ganged if we love, and darned if we didn’t? What other choice do we have, really? Turns out, there is another way - a more healthy way to allow love to be a healing, healthful force in your life. It requires that we allow ourselves to love and to be loved without seeking to possess or be possessed.

If we can love with the joy of the here and now, be present for what love has to offer, and yet also hold that love in its beautiful joy also shifts and changes, and that in its ebbs and flows, there will be some hurt, some joy and if we can cherish all of what love brings as a human experience, and allow it to be without demanding of it, then perhaps, we can love without hurting or being hurt – at least, not too much.Sometimes we might teeter on that cutting edge at that abyss of pain, and at that time, friends help. Poetry helps. Philosophy helps. Science? Well, the jury is out on that.