Maybe you just got out of a bad relationship and need closure, or maybe you started giving up on love a long time ago. Whatever your situation, maybe this perspective we will provide about love can help you on your journey. Love can feel like a battlefield, an all-out war against your happiness. It can feel like the highest cloud or the deepest cut in your soul. It can feel liberating or suffocating.
We all want love, but sometimes, we forget that love comes with a cost. It doesn’t just mean butterflies and rainbows. Sometimes, it means blood, sweat, and tears. It means sacrifice and commitment, courage and compromise. It means being willing to stand on the front lines and show up in your most authentic form. Sometimes, the magnitude of what love entails can overwhelm us, causing us to retreat and give up on it altogether.
We naturally want to run from pain, but when it comes to love, we can’t shut out the discomfort forever. We can’t forever lock ourselves in a room with steel walls and shelter ourselves from the entire world. While love can hurt, it can also heal. It can break your heart, but it can mend it, too. No matter your stance on love, hear us out for a second.
What’s the difference between giving up on love and letting it go?
Okay, we will start with the former – giving up on love. Giving up means shutting yourself out. It means backing away from any possibility of love instead of convincing yourself that true love doesn’t exist. It means accepting a life of hate and loneliness because when you give up on the idea of love, you give up on hope. You accept that love doesn’t exist, so you settle for less. You settle for feeling a constant hole in your chest, for feeling numb and lifeless. Without love, we cannot survive. So, when you give up on it, you die a slow, painful death. You end your life while still existing on this planet, and that seems far worse than actually dying.
None of us can truly wrap our heads around love because we don’t have all the answers. However, we have bodies with arms that we long to wrap around someone else. We have hearts that long for connection, intensity, and passion. We have our breath that we long to share with another. And we have stories on the tips of our tongues that need telling, and deep down, we desire someone to open up to. We want someone to hear us, to know us, to understand us. Usually, we want that someone in totality, in an all-encompassing way. We want romance, commitment, safety, and honesty.
We want someone to make us feel comfortable, to make us feel like love doesn’t have to be complicated. So why do we turn our backs on this possibility when we all desire much more?
More than 7 billion people live on this planet, and right now, many feel broken-hearted, scared, and alone. You might be among these people, so listen if you’re hurting. Don’t give up on love because by doing this, you’ll give up on a chance to connect with another on a deep level. Shallow relationships will only satisfy your body and mind temporarily, and they will leave you feeling empty at the end of the day.
To truly feel alive, we need love, and lots of it. Maybe instead of giving up on love, you could try letting it go instead?
Letting go of love means you still believe in it, but you must allow it to move on. This can apply to that ex-boyfriend or girlfriend you still look at pictures of and dream about every night. You want that feeling back, so you don’t want to give up on love. You want to let a person go that meant so much to you so that you can heal. Letting go of love means liberation while giving up on it means imprisonment. Releasing a toxic relationship allows you to create space for the right person to enter your life, while giving up on love entirely shuts EVERYONE out, regardless of their attitude about love and life.
Final Thoughts on Knowing the Difference Between Giving Up and Letting Go
So, the next time you feel threatened or in pain by love, ask yourself: “Will I let one person or situation cause me to abandon love altogether, or can I let that person go while still keeping the possibility of loving another in my heart?”
Love can live on even amid pain, but it can’t live in a heart full of resentment. Choose to love yourself and love others despite how they treat you, and you can finally escape the battle between love and pain.
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