For a long time, I thought love was supposed to hurt.
Not in a dramatic way, not all the time, but enough that you learned to swallow your reactions, to question your instincts, to explain away the moments that didn’t fit the story you wanted to be true.
My first love taught me that lesson early.
He had a white boxy Volvo station wagon named Stanley.
We used to drive at night just to drive.
We weren’t going anywhere. That was the luxury. Privacy, movement, music low enough to feel secret. A dark road that felt like a forest–moonlight or starlight enough to cast shadows, but not enough to make anything sharp. The headlights did most of the work. The rest was imagination.
We would hold hands. We could do that for hours. Driving nowhere, doing nothing, and it felt like everything.
Then a rabbit jumped out.
My heart dropped immediately. That sharp, bottomless feeling before thought catches up. I remember the fear rising faster than language. I was so scared we were going to hit it.
I felt the car swerve.
But not away.
Toward.
It took my brain a moment to register what my body already knew. I started crying instantly. Full-body crying. Head in my hands. Trying to fold myself inward, trying to disappear from what had just happened.
I couldn’t understand it.
How could you intentionally hurt something so innocent?
I asked why. Over and over. Why would you do that?
He was annoyed with me. It’s just a rabbit. It’s not a big deal. You’re overreacting.
I didn’t know how to argue. I didn’t know how to place the violence anywhere except inside myself. I didn’t know what it meant, only that something had cracked. And because I didn’t know what to do with it, I condoned it by default. I stayed. I swallowed it. I let it fester like an untreated wound.
I wish I could say it was a one-time thing.
It wasn’t.
Another night, outside his house, we saw an injured bird struggling on the lawn. I remember the relief I felt when he picked it up. Actual relief, like evidence had just been handed to me.
See? He’s good.
Then I heard the cat before I saw it. The sound of it coming closer. And I remember thinking, thank God, he’s saving the bird from something worse.
Instead, he threw the bird to the cat and walked away.
I lost it.
I don’t know how else to say that. Something inside me broke open. I couldn’t make sense of how someone could do that. I couldn’t make sense of how I loved someone who could do that.
I tried to leave.
I walked home, from his house to mine, down Highland Drive, one of the busiest streets in our neighborhood. I was crying so hard my chest hurt. My head was tight with pressure. Everything felt loud and exposed and raw. I could only see blurred edges of my tears.
He followed me in the car.
Not to apologize.
To explain.
The bird was going to die anyway. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a bird.
He trailed me as I walked, trying to convince me that my reaction was the problem.
At some point, he sped off.
And still, I let him back into my life. Again. And again. And again.
I don’t say that with judgment. I say it with sadness, and with clarity I didn’t have then. I didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like beyond pain. I thought intensity was intimacy. I thought endurance was devotion. I thought the ache in my chest meant I was doing something right, that love was supposed to cost me something, that it was supposed to hurt.
I didn’t yet know how to recognize a boundary as wisdom instead of weakness. I didn’t know that tenderness wasn’t naïveté. I didn’t know that confusion wasn’t depth.
So I stayed.
And I carried those moments inside me for years without language. Just a dull, unresolved knowing that something was wrong–not dramatic enough to flee, not quiet enough to forget.
Looking back now, what hurts most isn’t that he did those things.
It’s that my younger self knew something was off, and didn’t yet know she was allowed to leave.
That she was allowed to call harm what it was.
That love was not supposed to require this kind of swallowing.
That pain is not proof of connection.
This wasn’t about animals.
It was about innocence.
About empathy.
About what gets dismissed as “not a big deal” and what gets lodged into the body anyway.
These memories sit at the center of how I learned love.
Not as something gentle or safe, but as something that demanded I make room for violence: explain it, minimize it, survive it. And call that loyalty.
I’m unlearning that. I landed in the safest relationship of my entire life, but I still carry the pain that I need to unwind from my past to release myself enough to fall deeper into the love I have with my husband.
It’s slow, too slow for my preference. And I have to be careful with myself, too gentle for my preference. And it all carries grief and anger and compassion for the girl who didn’t yet know she deserved better.
I don’t write this to condemn him.
I write it to honor her.
Because she felt it.
Even when she didn’t know what to do with it.
And because telling the truth now is part of finally letting that pain go somewhere other than inward.
