But instead, Instagram chooses that precise moment to place a reel in front of me—a scene from The Buccaneers. A girl‐on‐fire voice breaks through the hush:

“Love is a heart attack. Love is the best and worst part of everything.
Love is hating someone with every inch of your soul, yet spending even a minute without them is the worst pain you’ve ever known.”

I replay it once, twice, a dozen times, until the words stop being dialogue and settle into my chest like confession. Something sharp and strangely tender turns over inside me.

Because I’ve always known love exactly this way: a contradiction that walks into your life wearing the softest smile and carrying a lit match behind its back. Love is never just gentle. It’s collision, combustion—comfort kneeling beside chaos. It dismantles the careful armor you’ve spent years forging, peeling you open with a touch that feels like reverence one moment and like lightning the next. You look at this person, aware they could shatter you, and invite them closer anyway, breathing in the risk as if it were fresh air.

That’s the maddening part: love is rarely peaceful if it’s the kind that truly changes you. It’s the heart attack you enter willingly, a fever that burns through all your neat expectations. Yes, there are forehead kisses and flowers, but there are also slammed doors that echo down empty hallways, unanswered midnight messages blinking like Morse code for I miss you and I hate that I do. There’s the held breath in the space between hope and heartbreak. And just when you can’t find the language for any of it, songs rush in—because music always seems to understand our contradictions before we do.

Think of the anguish in Taylor Swift and Bon Iver’s “exile,” the resigned ache of watching someone drift away in slow motion. Or the sepia‑tinted redemption of Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You,” a reminder that sometimes love does return, softer and wiser than before. Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” howls for the kiss that never lands, while Hozier’s “Cherry Wine” aches with the quiet harm that blooms inside certain embraces. Every track is a diary entry sung aloud, proof that love can be hymn and dirge in the same breath.

Then there are the people we hate to love—the ones who know every tender spot beneath our bravado. They press those hidden bruises, sometimes by accident, sometimes because their own pain tells them to lash out. Yet we stay. We stay because their absence sounds louder than any argument, because the idea of a world without their laugh, their scent, their particular chaos feels like being locked outside your own home. Their flaws mirror our own, forcing us to stare at parts of ourselves we’d rather ignore. Love, in that mirror, becomes a brutal teacher: it reveals our worst corners while somehow illuminating our best.

And what of the nights after the storm, when everything is too quiet and your phone is turned face‑down on the pillow? You rehearse angry speeches you’ll never send, scroll through old photos, skip songs you once shared—only to circle back and play them again because pretending indifference hurts more than honesty. This is the truth we rarely post about: hatred is often grief wearing steel‑toed boots, kicking at the door of a heart that still wants in.

So maybe love is all of it—the 2 a.m. tears, the text drafted and deleted, the playlist on repeat, the promise you make to yourself to never feel this deeply again (and the certainty you will). Love is both wound and balm, curse and cure. It’s the snarl of “I never want to see you again” tangled up with the softness of “Text me when you get home.”

We keep choosing it—again, again, again—because somewhere beneath the bruises and the bliss is the quiet knowledge that the things with power to break us also shine the brightest light on who we are. The most beautiful sunsets bleed into the sky only after the sun sets itself on fire. The finest porcelain rings when you tap it, precisely because it’s fragile.

And love?

Love is the most beautiful violence we will ever endure—an ache that proves, beyond all doubt, that our hearts are still beating.