Real love is comforting and reassuring, but usually not from the beginning.

The light of love is meant to shine upon the eerie, aching aspects of our soul, upon every piece of past brokenness hidden beneath the rocks in our heart. But in that rocky tomb also lies our energy, passion and vitality. Apparently dead, but still sleeping. True love will push away the rock and set our heart free. “ (Marianne Williamson) I love Marianne Williamson's lyrics. Because they express very clearly what relationships are really about: about our own healing. What is the point of suffering now? Why does "love" have to hurt so much? Love never hurts. It's our expectations that make us suffer when they are not met. It's the old wounds of the heart that reopen by the encounter with true love and that hurt. Can it really be the point of a love relationship to reopen old wounds? This is how paradoxical it might sound. Yes! We need to make the wounds visible and feel them again so that they can heal. And only a person who is really close to us can do that, because love can open the heart. As painful as it is, it is healing at the same time. The old wounds are healing and layer by layer the wall around the heart is being taken down. We are all hurt in some way. Maybe as children we didn't get what we so desperately needed, maybe we were abused physically and mentally, maybe as adults we were cheated on, abandoned and betrayed. So it can easily happen that we come to the inner conviction that equating love with pain and total annihilation. This results that from now on, we instinctively get out of the way of all the people who remind us of past suffering. We close our hearts. This makes our lives a mixture of fleeing and denial. It makes life that could be beautiful and fulfilled, empty and lifeless. Maybe we have or had elusive affairs instead of true love relationships, or we just indulged in relationships that didn’t allow for real closeness from the beginning (with partners who couldn’t touch our hearts and thus gave us a sense of emotional security and “invulnerability”). Yet by doing so, we deny ourselves everything that makes life worth living: connection, security, vitality, closeness and love. We don't get into relationships to confront our own soul on the deepest level. So many feelings can come to the surface that we have suppressed throughout our lives: fear and panic of losing a loved one, or fear of losing hard-fought freedom and independence, anger and resentment over one's own powerlessness, jealousy and self-doubt, self-hatred and devaluation, or even a immense sadness. Because whoever opens up to love opens up to pain. The road to love leads through pain, through our deepest fears and heartbreaks!