July 2025, 9 Minutes

Heavy the Burden

Why Love is So Hard, and Why It Must Be That Way

Love is hard.

You know it, I know it, everyone else knows it, too.

Doesn’t it seem like it shouldn’t be, though? Like, intuitively?

It’s a wonderful thing, after all. I would uncontroversially argue the best thing of all. So how can it be that something so good for us, so essential to our living a fulfilled, completed life, something so rewarding, can actually bum us the fuck out so much, maybe more than anything else can?

And to make matters worse, it’s not just hard in one way, but a variety of them.

Heartbreak is a good place to start, if the ending of things is truly actually the beginning of things. It’s a fracturing thing. Illusions of permanence and safety are broken into smithereens. Love intertwines identity and hope and memory, thus its loss feels like losing part of yourself. Additionally, the brain processes it like physical pain, triggering grief and withdrawal, sometimes even trauma response. It also unsettles the future while haunting the past, creating an uncertain temporal reality for its duration. Basically, it sucks, but it may be one of the necessary rites of passage our beings are obliged to go through, like a driving test for our soul. Perhaps, speaking to that, it is the case that until you have love, until you are in love, you are not really alive at all. A vertiginous yet energising thought.

Love may also increase our sense of vulnerability, remove us from our comfort zones, and expose parts of ourselves we usually keep hidden. It demands openness and trust, which can be utterly terrifying. Pertaining once more to heartbreak, when love ends, that same vulnerability can feel like weakness, making us question our worth and fear intimacy again.

In addition, love is hard because it often clashes with our desire for control and a sense of certainty. Emotions can be unpredictable and overwhelming, making us feel powerless. Balancing individual freedom with deep connection creates a tension. The fear of loss or rejection can make love feel like a gamble, where the stakes are deeply personal.

My primary interest here, however, is that seeming contradiction: that love makes us worry, adds dimensions of anxiety to our lives that should short circuit our Central Nervous System on the daily.

And it all came from a song I recently heard…

Listening to Spotify through my earphones in a café, the App’s cheery AI DJ shuffled on a Bad Omens song – The Death of Peace of Mind, and it got me a-thinking.

The song is – on brand – brooding and emotionally intense. It blends alternative metal, industrial rock, dark pop and a bit of synth, and is the titular track from their 2022 album.

The song could be considered toxic. It explores emotional obsession, desire, and the consequent internal conflict. It paints a musical portrait of someone consumed by longing, trapped in a destructive love that steals their inner peace. The lyrics use intimate, confessional language, often blurring the line between pleasure and pain, love and suffering, odi et amo. Typical of the lead singer - Virginia native Noah Sebastian - the verses are restrained and whispery, almost sensual, but a tension always simmers beneath. The chorus validates that tension, erupting with emotional intensity, echoing the lyrical theme of mental breakdown and inner collapse, “When the curtains call the time will we both go home alive?/
It wasn't hard to realize love's the death of peace of mind”.
Distorted and anguished is how I would best describe the song, the kind of music that bounces around in a sleepless head, deep into the night. But this ain’t a song review, and I’m not much good at putting music into words anyhow.

But, if art inspires thinking or feeling, it’s done its job – its purpose is realised, its essence maintained. And that particular art piece did get my noggin sprinting. It’s ironic too, as I’m not normally one for lyrics; I usually ignore them or dissociate from them completely. And yet, here we are.

Finding Logos in Tummyflies

What is going on here interests me. Perhaps I’m scratching a surface that was long ago revealed, but I have a compulsion to understand that which is taken for granted. The devil is in the detail, after all, and I sometimes I wish to stare directly in the devil’s eyes, if only to understand everything a little bit more.

I once heard it said across a bar behind which I was working that when you have children, you are destined to only ever be as happy as your least happy child. Despite having no children of my own, that made perfect sense. Perfect logical sense. Perhaps an odd choice of understanding considering the flesh & fibre, and utterly dynamic, nature of this curious thing called love.

I could make evolutionary arguments here, as I have been increasingly inclined to do, but I’m not sure they’re required. Logic would probably do the trick instead.

Want me to do it? Want me to dust off the formal logic from my degree of many a yesteryear?

Ok, well, you asked for it…

First up, before love came the self-centred state

Let S(x) mean “x is concerned only with self.”

For person A, before love:

S(A) is true.

Being self-centred means decisions, emotions, and priorities depend solely on A's own state, simplifying the logical domain.

Now we find ourselves after love, but not in that way, meaning we are in a state where love is now present in our lives. Due to this presence, we have developed an instinct of shared concern.

Let L(A,B) mean “A loves B.”

Love creates a logical dependency:

L(A,B) ⇒ Concern(A,B), where Concern(A,B) means “A’s emotional or cognitive state depends on B’s state.”

This means:

¬S(A) (A no longer focused only on self)

∀p (p is relevant to B) ⇒ p is relevant to A

The universe of relevant propositions for A expands drastically. Therefore, we now have a domain of concern, and its expansion leads to increased complexity.

Before love:

A reasons only about propositions about A (call this domain D_A).

After love:

Domain expands to D_{A,B} = D_A ∪ D_B (all propositions about A and B).

The complexity of reasoning, worries, and potential conflicts grows—more variables, more uncertainty, more dependencies.

Therefore, the logical consequence is increased worry

Worry can be seen as a function of the number of dependent propositions and their uncertainty.

Formally, if W(A) is “A worries,” then:

W(A) increases as size(D) and uncertainty(U) increase.

Since |D_{A,B}| > |D_A| and U(D_{A,B}) ≥ U(D_A), then:

L(A,B) ⇒ W(A) ↑ (Love increases worry).

Of course, this deduction relies on the claim that worry is proportional to domain complexity and uncertainty - which I take to be reasonable psychological and cognitive assumption. If you disagree, or if you perceive my logic to be flawed, please lemme know! I am no Leibniz, no Gödel - my formal logic is rusted over like a bicycle long ago abandoned in an urban canal.

To sum it up in human language, love is logically hard because it expands the domain of what we must care about beyond ourselves to include others, multiplying the number of relevant factors and uncertainties we must consider, which naturally leads to increased worry and emotional complexity.

Ok, enough of whatever the fuck that was. I need a palate cleanser, as I am sure you also do.

Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask such questions; I’m unsure I have the requisite majesty of soul. Better to ask Romeo and Juliet, Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, Aragorn and Arwen…

Or maybe, best of all, ask Alexander Pope.

A Story set at the Paraclete Abbey, France

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.”

You may recognise the Eternal Sunshine… line as the title of the 2004 film starring Jim Carey and Kate Winslet. It’s a good film with an appropriate title. It’s a surreal romantic drama exploring memory, love, and loss. After a painful breakup, a couple undergoes a procedure to erase each other from their minds, only to rediscover their deep connection.

One of my preferred drinking memoires is sitting in a flat overlooking London’s St Giles’ Circus reciting lines from the poem with a psychoanalyst distantly related to the Krays (his recall put mine to shame) while his girlfriend taught my friend how to order drinks in sign language, an expertise she taught. It was a good night. And, like so many good nights, it actually lasted a few days. Memory lane is going to end there, though, chiefly due to fact that my memories end there.

Within Pope’s work, as well as poetry, there is history.

Héloïse and Peter Abélard’s story of love is one of the most tragic and intellectually packed romances of…well, I would say ever. Abélard was a brilliant philosopher (fittingly, an impressive logician, too) and theologian in 12th-century Paris; Héloïse, his gifted student, was known for her wit and learning. Their relationship began as a secret affair, but when Héloïse became pregnant, a scandal erupted. Eruptions are typically destructive things, and this instance was no exception to that rule. The pair married in secret to protect Abélard’s reputation, but Héloïse’s uncle Fulbert (a fittingly villainous name of which Victor Hugo would approve), enraged by the perceived dishonour, orchestrated Abélard’s (cross your legs, lads) brutal castration.

Afterward, as was the fashion at the time, Abélard became a monk and Héloïse a nun, though their love endured through a series of letters exchanged over many years. These letters were passionate, philosophical, and deeply emotional. They reveal Héloïse as a woman torn between spiritual duty and worldly love, and Abélard as a man seeking redemption but still bound by longing. Their Socratic charioteer had an almighty task of restraining their passion with overwhelming reason. In the end, those calloused, leather-bitten hands won out.

What happened to the product of their “forbidden” love, you may wonder. Well, it was a boy, and he was named Astrolabe. He did not play a major role in history. He was raised by his father’s family and, following his father, became a monk, rising to some prominence in the Brittany diocese which he called home. That’s it. We can assume a few things: he had no contact with his parents, he had no children, and he had no siblings - the direct line ended with his death.

Alexander Pope’s poem, of which I began this part with an excerpt, Eloisa to Abelard, is a dramatic monologue that gives voice to Héloïse's inner torment. Written in heroic couplets, it captures her emotional conflict between sacred vows and lingering desire. Pope presents Héloïse as torn between earthly love and divine duty, immortalising her sorrow with lyrical intensity. If you can, read it. I might change you just a little bit. It did me.

Just a little bit, that is.

…

What in the end for Heloise and Abelard? If your heart is that of the romantic, you will yearn to know, but that yearning will be tinged with fear…

Release fear from your heart.

She crossed the rift after him, and I like to imagine him holding out a steady hand, to take her slightly trembling one, letting her know it was all gonna be ok.

She was buried beside him. Simply, in the grounds of the abbey, by friends who understood; men and women whose hearts were orientated towards the good. Smaller souls would have kept them separated in death, as they were in life. If you’re the praying type, which I confess I am not, throw some love their nameless way next time.

That was not their final resting place, however. In 1817, they were carefully disinterred at the direction of Josephine Bonaparte and carted to the city of a hundred nicknames, Paris.

I’ve seen their grave in Père Lachaise cemetery, that great mini city of the dead in the heart of a living one. They have been deceased closing in on a thousand years at this point. That’s a long time.

Their shared tomb resembles a small Gothic chapel, complete with pointed arches, columns, and ornate tracery. Tucked beneath trees and surrounded by iron fencing, their tomb feels like the capturing of a very distant memory.

It is crafted primarily from limestone and weathered heavily by time (Paris is a rainy city, after all, a fact noticed by many a disappointed traveller). Inside the canopy rest the effigies of Abelard and Héloïse, lying side by side. Abelard is depicted in the robes of a scholar philosopher, his hands in prayer. Héloïse lies next to him, equally serene, her figure more youthful and somehow gentler. Their stone bodies don’t touch, but they do not need to. Surrounding them are gothic inscriptions in Latin, in the main fragments from their lives and letters.

You can leave something behind, if you wish. Much as pilgrims to their long-away neighbour Jim Morrisons’ gravesite like to pour a warm French beer out over his resting soil, after taking a swig themselves (yes, I have…). Visitors leave flowers, notes, and love letters. In this way, the site has turned into a sort of secular pilgrimage for tragic lovers and literary souls.

It is quiet, solemn, a place charged with centuries of longing. One day the elements will steal their faces, and then one day long after that, their bodies will dissolve under times relentless assault. But none of that will matter. In this respect, matter doesn’t matter.

At the end of his long poem, Pope put the following words into Héloïse’s mouth,

“May one kind grave unite each hapless name,
And graft my love immortal on thy fame!
Then, ages hence, when all my woes are o’er,
When this rebellious heart shall beat no more;
If ever chance two wand’ring lovers brings
To Paraclete’s white walls and silver springs,
O’er the pale marble shall they join their heads,
And drink the falling tears each other sheds...”

Good on her, she got her wish, she got her man.

Love, it seems, always finds a way.

…

Love is a vast ocean with unseen currents, storms, monsters. But it’s full of life, too, and its horizons are always out there, over the great lip of being and nothingness. There are shores over those horizons, shores that look like home. All we must do is keep sailing towards them.

Yeah, love is hard. But a life without love is infinitely harder. Peace is the price paid, and it’s worth paying.

Photo by: Anastasiya Lobanovskaya