how does love turn into pain?

It starts with the best of us.
The soft eyes. The slow texts. The feeling of being known.

It starts with love.
Real love.

The kind we mean.
The kind we hope will save us.

But somehow —
in the middle of the story —
something changes.

A misunderstanding. A wound. A mirror we weren’t ready to look into.

And instead of asking what happened…
we armor up.
We protect. We punish. We pull away.

The love is still there —
but now it’s wrapped in grief.
Twisted by fear. Muted by patterns we don’t understand
but keep repeating anyway.

And what hurts the most?
We still mean well.
We still love.
And still… we cause pain.

How does something so beautiful
become the very thing we were trying to escape?

And why —
when we see it happening —
do we dig in instead of soften?

Maybe the tragedy isn’t that love fades.
Maybe it’s that love forgets how to love
once pain starts talking louder.

✧ quiet prompt:

What version of your love has been shaped more by memory than presence?

🌒 next layer:

→ read: pain that pretends to be love → chapter: underneath