Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind.

Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.

While love lasts it should be relished, gobbled up like ice cream, explored as the conquistadors explored the unknown continent. But when love evaporates, when love hurts, we must learn to let go of the idea that love is forever.

If you welcome love knowing it is insubstantial, a chemical reaction, you heal more quickly when it ends and you open the doors of your heart more readily when a new love comes knocking.

Man was not born to be monogamous. What has changed in the 21st century – at 21 the world surely has come of age – is the understanding that woman is not meant to be monogamous either. Just as love hurts, new love heals.

When you lose love, there is a tendency to blame yourself, to stop loving yourself. When this happens, you withdraw into your own little world where perceptions get muddled and you spin off on that roundabout of unanswerable questions: Why me? What went wrong? What did I do?

These thoughts diminish our capacity to start again. Love hurts and the pain lasts until you climb off the roundabout, stand still on one spot and cast your eyes towards a new horizon. It is never too early and it is never too late to be yourself again.

There are many kinds of love. Love of family, children, causes, fetishes, addictions – the English love their animals a little more than they love each other. Some love their country, although, having been born in this place or that place provides no intellectual basis to be proud of that accident of fate.

Love between man and woman – man/man; woman/woman – is different, more extreme, more complex, more intense. Love expresses itself in sex and, even with the best will in the world, sex with the same partner grows dull, tedious, repetitive. Open relationships allow love to linger without the pressure to be faithful.

I have always been afraid of love and when it came sparkling into my life like a seam of liquid diamonds, it changed me, weakened me in some ways, perhaps strengthened me in others. I stopped being promiscuous. Writing came easier, the words flowed as if a broken tap inside me had been mended.

I thought that love would last forever. But nothing is forever. Life is not forever. The only reliable permanence is change. Love hurts because change is painful. Love hurts because love lost is an assault on our ego. We fear that we will fail again and those who live in fear of failure slowly but inevitably fail.

Losing my love turned my heart into an open wound. The tears I wept tasted of acid and burned my cheeks. My tongue swelled in my throat. I wrote empty verse with a fountain pen, dipping the nib into my own blood, scratching out words, unpicking my thoughts as I lay sleeplessly in my empty bed.

Love hurts in the long black night of winter. I hibernated like a wounded bear. I watched the frost grow on the window panes. Then Easy Jet sent me a random text saying I could fly to Barcelona for £39, and that’s what I did. I started teaching English and studying Spanish. I changed my life. I met Ramon, the man under whom I climbed in order to forget the man who had gone back to his old life without me. And the hurt stopped hurting.

That was eight weeks ago. You lose yourself in the darkness until you find yourself again in the light. The light changes everything. Ramon is seven years younger than me. He can make love all night, sleep for an hour and make love again as the first glint of morning peeps through the window. He is my trainer, my teacher. His semen inside me is an elixir.

We went to the Canary islands and made love in the moonlight with the sea lapping at our feet. Love hurts. Love can kill you. I had loved Tom deeply. I thought I would have his babies. That we would be together forever. But nothing is forever. The only permanence is change. To quote Katie in Katie in Love: The only way to get over one man is to get under another.

“You don’t feel yourself falling in love, like it’s a journey, a process; on the contrary, it hits you like a sudden ague, a fever, the realisation that your life will never be the same again.”

“An attractive woman becomes beautiful when she’s happy and in love.”

“Love and being in love are not the same thing. The woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.”

The post Love Hurts and There is Only One Cure appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.