I know it's been a while since I posted anything. I've been kind of busy. I decided to pop in and post a thing I wrote on love and pain. It's written from a logical, not emotional point of view. Feel free to comment on it's contents.

The sad impossibility of walking through life without hurting anyone, either physically or emotionally, accidentally or on purpose can be a great source of self-inflicted pain when reflected upon. For example, take the condition of being in love. Not in loving, as simply loving is very different than being in love. First off, the intensity of this feeling has the ability to give you sharp stabbing pains all on its own. Sometimes it seems as if it would hurt less to be hit with a brick than to fall in love.
The first scenario is when you fall in love with somebody. There are many outcomes. Quite a few are intensely painful. For instance, there’s falling in love with somebody you don’t know. This one isn’t so bad. If you are lucky and can maintain, you can be in love with them from afar, never have to tell them, and eventually get over it. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most painful, it’s usually a 3 or 4.
Then there is when you fall in love with somebody you do know. If it’s simply an acquaintance, that’s not too bad. If it’s a close friend, there’s a recipe for disaster. Either way, you have choices to make. You can pretend you aren’t in love with them, you can allow yourself to admit you are in love with them, or you can even go so far as to tell them you are in love with them. I tend to have the bad taste to fall in love with friends. Bad taste, bad luck, I’m not sure.
If you choose the path of pretending you aren’t in love with the person, then there’s a set of problems that can arise. With you trying to ignore the feeling you are suppressing emotions, not getting rid of them. When you bottle things up inside you like this the outcome can be disastrous. Eventually, with the contents under pressure, the bottle will explode and cover you and the object of your affection with a lot of intense emotions. You can start to become weird as the pressure builds. Every time you see them with somebody else, hear them speaking of somebody else, or even hug another person, the jealousy arises. But you end up denying its jealousy because you are denying you are in love. You might begin by making sniping comments about their current crush, love interest or significant other. After a while, it will be impossible for them to ignore this and it will begin to piss them off. And you will keep doing it until you realize its pissing them off. At that stage it can get much uglier. Since you are still in denial then it might go even further to where you begin to seek their attention any way you can get it. This might include putting yourself down simply so they might tell you that “No, you aren’t ugly” or “Really I like your hair that color,” anything to possibly feed your starving ego. But if this approach doesn’t work, then sometimes the brain gets more desperate for attention and will even revel in negative attention. You might threaten to harm yourself or another, imply very risky behavior, or insinuate that you have been abusing yourself (drugs, alcohol, cutting type behavior, etc.). You might even go as far as to harm yourself. Not a lot, but enough to get their attention. But what is really happening here is that you are driving the person you are in love with away from you. If they are a friend, then they at least care about you to some extent. And they can’t handle the constant threats of harming yourself. Usually they don’t know what to do about it and end up having to withdraw, which can make you hurt all the worse. This is also a possible outcome with admitting you are in love with the person and even with telling them you are in love with them. It isn’t as bad though if you can admit it to yourself and/or them. It can be the most hurtful to them and you if you deny it all.
If you can at least admit to yourself that you are in love with this person, it is easier to an extent. You don’t usually end up with such extremes in behavior in a vain attempt to get the object of your affection to pay attention to you. It can happen, but usually isn’t so bad.
The hardest one for me is when you not only admit to yourself but to the person that you have fallen in love with them. This is a very hard one for me because I am a very intensely emotional person and every time I fall in love with a friend that I care about, it’s never anyone who can return my love, for a variety of reasons. Not all people have this problem though. Some people can and do fall in love with friends and it all works out. I’ve never fallen in love with a friend and had it come to a good end. It can happen though. Just not to me, lol. The main problem is that if you admit to them that you are in love with them, this opens you up to attack. It’s admitting a weakness that the other person didn’t know existed before. It’s a huge trust issue. If they aren’t the person you thought they were, they might use this knowledge to use you or abuse you for their own pleasure, love having nothing to do with it at all. And sometimes what happens is that you so desperately want them to be in love with you too that you let them use you. You know its happening but you can’t seem to draw that line. That’s where the pain gets really bad. It hurts that they don’t return your love but you still do and do for them because there is that vague hope in the back of your mind that they will wake up and see you for who you are and realize that you are beautiful and worth their love. Unfortunately people who tend to use or to take and never give don’t end up realizing this and really aren’t worth your love in the first place.
The second scenario is when somebody that you are not in love with falls in love with you. This is one that doesn’t happen to me, although I’ve talked other people through it so I’m quite familiar with how it works. There’s a couple of different ways it can work, the first being that the person hasn’t told you they are in love with you but it’s obvious. This is usually noticed when they kind of become clingy in either a physical or emotional way. You know something is not right but might not be able to put your finger on it at first.
The whole clingy phase is quite disturbing if you think of this person simply as a friend, or even just as “somebody I know”. They seem to get quite intense and you know something is up, even if they aren’t admitting to anything. If you figure out that the person IS in love with you, whether they admit it or not, there are a few choices you can make. One choice is to ignore it. This might work, depending on the person you are dealing with. If they are not TOO intensely in love with you, then you stand a good chance of getting through it with a minimum of scars. If they are totally head over heals for you, then no choice you make will be painless. If you ignore them, they will head straight to the negative attention phase and then you will have to withdraw for the sake of your own sanity. Or you could choose to try to date them, feeling that maybe something within you will develop. This can happen. It’s never happened to me, but it can happen. What’s most likely though is that while they are totally smitten with you, you are still trying to get used to the idea of dating them and can at that point become even more withdrawn as things feel as if they are moving way too fast for you. And then there is the “object of affection” tactic. In order to try to escape being the object of their affection, you introduce them to somebody who DOES want to date them. With any luck, they will agree to date the person and you get some relief. With lots of luck, they end up in love with that person rather than you. If they don’t go for the object of affection tactic and they begin to move toward the negative attention side of the spectrum, then the best thing to do is to withdraw before things get even worse. I know it sounds cruel, and I know it is hurtful, but you have to protect your own sanity and you really can’t help it that you aren’t attracted to them in any way. You will feel horrible doing this, and it’s painful for both parties. It’s necessary though. If you have no attraction to them and continue to associate with the person and they have displayed the warning signs, it is cruel to you and to them to allow it to continue. If you let them keep associating with you then anything you say that doesn’t come out as a negative statement towards them ends up giving them small bits of hope that you might be able to be in love with them too if you tried. I know this because I’ve been in this place many times. I think it really ends up hurting worse being lead along with the hope of some sort of reward, only in the end to feel used and depressed, ready to open a vein to stop the pain.
In summary here, being in love hurts. It doesn’t matter if you are the one in love or the object of such affection. It doesn’t matter how it happens, but if you are involved in one of the scenarios I mentioned above, then you will be in pain and you will hurt the other person involved. Well, unless you are of that lucky minority that can fall in love with a friend who is in love with you. But don’t hold your breath on that one. But please do remember that no matter which side you are on, if you think about it from the other person’s point of view it can at least mitigate the pain so it’s manageable.