Love and the Beauty of Hurt

“What is love?” I have tried to answer this question for as long as I remember. I know many of my Christian friends would say “God is love”. I respect your answer but sorry your answer is too vague and too broad to be applied. Some of my theologian friends would define it based on the Koine Greek words used in the New Testament to describe love. In the Greek New Testament love could be “agape”, “philia”or “eria” (“agapos”, “philos” or “eros” when used as a verb). “Agape” is for selfless, altruistic and unconditional love. “Philia” is for brotherly or common love, and “eros” is for romantic love. I would agree to these exegetical definitions but still there is a lot more to it.

Love is the most overused and abused word these days. The millennial uses it describe almost every feeling. When you travel on taxi you will hear songs, “I love you more than I can say”, “One love” or “Do you love me?” Love has been nothing but a universal replacer for every good feeling we have. It basically means “I feel good about…” I do not commit to say that I agree with the millennial definition of love.

What made me write today is that recently I experienced “hurt”. I feel I have made myself vulnerable to the extent to be hurt by people I love. Here is the very problem: I do not differentiate between the head and the heart. For many people the heart is the epicenter of love while the head is the tower of knowledge. “You love with your heart,” they say. No! I do not agree with that statement. For to me, the head and the heart are the same. I love with my head. I love with knowledge. I love with calculation. That has been my understanding. How could I be hurt?

I couldn’t explain my recent feelings. If hurt is real and true, then follows love. Unless someone is in love why would they be hurt? Love takes risks. One of the risks love takes is called expectation. As we love someone, we are naturally expecting to be loved. When the expectations are not met, we will be hurt. This is the proper calculation. Hence, heart and head have to be different. You cannot calculate the risks on your head and be ready. There is no preparation to love someone. You just do it, right? That is how normal people think.

I do not believe in this. I’m a thinker. For me the head and the heart are the same. I cannot take risks to love someone without calculating the risks and be ready for it. In order to avoid taking risks, I mostly end up loving someone superficially. I’m afraid of commitments. If I committed to love someone I’m afraid that I will get hurt eventually. I don’t want to get hurt. This has been me for most of the days until recently.

 “Philos” - “Eros” - “Agapos” – My Story

Most psychologists agree that human beings experience love in stages. Childhood age is the age of “philos” where children love everyone with brotherly, sisterly, motherly and fatherly love. The psychosocial theory of Sigmund Freud also relates children as a loving machine. They love everyone they see as friends. For children there is only “philia”, if not hate. There is no middle ground.

Teenage, however, is a transition from “philos” to “eros”. With secondary sexual characteristics in development, they find themselves trying to get out of the mask of “philia” to enjoy “eros”, romantic love. The transition will not always be smooth and it highly depends on the influence of parents, peers and siblings. Teenagers want to enjoy “eros” so much that they will forget and undermine “philia”. Family love and attachment starts to decrease and they will tie with their peers, not with “philia” but with competition. Falling in love in teenage years, especially for boys, is very common and the weirdest feeling of all.

Let me be brutally honest with you. Yes, I have experienced “eros”.  The first time I experienced this form of love was when I was a grade 7 student. There was this girl, the smartest student of our class who was also a Muslim, and I liked her. I was a Christian but I was also a twelve years old Christian. Stop judging!

My twelve years old mind was able to like a girl. I experienced “eros” for the first time. The weirdest part is that I never even understood what it meant “to love”. I didn’t know the goal of loving her. I just liked her. The mind of 12 years teenagers work this way. They don’t need to be rational to experience “eros”. I was driven by the biopychosocial need around me. Do not judge your children if they experience such love. Guide them. Teach them how to take care of such feelings. Thank God I never told her.

The fire age of 17-21 is the age of multiple “eros”. Now we experience “eros” reasonably. Most of the time the reason is to gain sexual gratification. This is the time of transition too. Youngsters at this age will start to ask the meaning of life. This is the point where they come to understand what it means to love unconditionally. They want to discover altruistic form of love. They want to experience “agape”. They won’t be satisfied by “eros” anymore. This is the age where many decide to become missionaries or to join military. “eros” alone will not be the driving force anymore.

After the age of 21, people start to make balance between “philia”, “eros and “agape”. They want to have a normal and stable friendship with their peers. They want to have selfless love for their country or God. They also will eventually fall in love with opposite sex.

I’m now 2 months away from celebrating my 24^th birthday. I’m trying to live creating balance with “philia”,”eros” and “agape”. I do have a good-to-normal “philia” with my friends. I do have a good-to-normal “agape” to God and to people. What about “eros”? That’s the point I want to talk about.

Love Takes Risk

Three years ago I took a one-week Bible class on God’s love with a UK preacher, Robin Sanderson. Pastor Robin would say again and again that God took risk when he chose to love us. “What? Why would God take risks to love us his tiny creatures?” was the question in my head. Three years from that lecture I now understand that God is the most vulnerable being.

God took risk to love his tiny creature to which he gave free will. The key word here is “free will”. God is hurt because people are free to choose whatever they want. We can despise God and reject his offer or we can love him. The fact that we have free will puts God in a vulnerable position. There are many instances where we read God’s frustrations (the sign of being hurt) in the Bible.

We are hurt by the people we love because they have free will. Normally we are hurt on two bases one is if the person we love (“eros” or “philos”) rejects our offer. Second is that the person accepts our offer but walks away in the middle of the journey. The second one is where people experience “broken-heart syndrome”. In light of this, I am thankful that I didn’t experience the second kind of hurt. No one walked away from my life. Why? The answer is because I didn’t take the risk to let anyone in.

The New Normal

Recently, I experience hurt. Here is what happened: There is this person I very much like. I mean really like. I’ve spent much time with that person than anyone for the last one year. When I befriended this person I calculated every risk from distance. I didn’t make big statements. I didn’t even consider that person to be “the best” as a friend. Even when I felt I had feelings for that person, I just knew that was a time framed feeling. One day the feeling will expire when we move apart because of jobs or other issues.

Was the feeling “eros” or “philos”? I choose “philos” for much of the days. However, recently I came to understood that it has to be more than “philos”, somewhere between “philos” and “eros”. Can we get a middle ground Koine Greek word, please?

I haven’t told the person whether I love the person with “eros” or “philos” yet. I choose not to tell the person right this time. I want to be hurt. I want to experience what it means to be hurt. I also want to believe the heart and the head are not the same. Even if I felt I calculated the risks, it was way beyond that. Love is something uncalculable.

Hurt is a blessing. Hurt is beautiful. If you cannot experience hurt, there is no way you know that you are in love with anyone or anything. Has someone hurt you? You should rest in the fact that you are a fire – proven lover.

The Scary Truth

When talking about being hurt, I shall not forget the ever difficult question I encounter. “Have I hurt anyone?” Most of us don’t want to hurt anyone. As much as experiencing hurt is beautiful, to hurt someone is evil. The scary truth is yes, I have hurt many people. I have failed to make to the expectations of many people who love me.

I’m deeply saddened by the fact that at times I have failed to love back the people who loved me. I wish I could love them. I wish I could do whatever it takes to please them. I couldn’t. This breaks my hurt more than the hurt of being not loved by someone. “Eros” is exclusive and sensitive. You cannot just fall in love with every person. For this reason you will hurt some of them. You will also hurt by the others. This is life.

The scariest of all truth of hurt is that I have continuously hurt the person who loved me most, God. I have hurt God in many ways. This is not “eros” or “philos”. This is “agapos”, an unconditional love. Though hurt by the tiny creature, he still sticks to the covenant he made at the cross. He loves us. You may have hurt God. You may have disobeyed him. You may have walked away in the middle of the journey with him. The truth is that He still loves you. He loves me. He loves us! He took all the risks that we might reject him someday when he considered sending his one only Son to die for us. This is love. This is “agapos”.

Coming back to the question in the introduction, “What is love?” I would answer it saying “Love is taking all the risks to have someone in your journey.” I would love to take risks to have the person who hurt me recently in my journey. Would that happen? We’ll see.