Ms Cyprah

Q. Everyone has heard the old saying, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” but has anyone thought of the other side of it: all the pain and heartbreak you would save yourself if you never got attached to someone? Most normal, healthy, functioning adults require some kind of companionship that could very easily lead to love. But is it really worth it?

A. Everything we do in our lives is ‘worth it’, simply because life is a journey and we start off very green, very inexperienced and rather ignorant of it then finish up very wise, resilient and much stronger for what we have to endure. Everything we experience along the way is designed to toughen us up. We cannot avoid pain and hurt no more than we can avoid pleasure because they are two sides of the same coin. Nature is about balance. If we only had pleasure, we would not be able to deal with the crises in our lives and if we had only pain, we would be very weak in health and fortitude. Everything we go through also teaches us something.

The reason why some people suffer more pain from their relationships than others is because they tend to blame their partners for any disappointments and repeat the negative patterns in their behaviour with others down the line instead of reviewing what went wrong, learning the lessons from it and being an even better person for the next connection. Many people don’t really know what they want and often settle for second best until they get burnt later on. Others prefer to live in denial about their lives and so tend to keep getting what they’ve always got. It is better to love than not at all because pleasure always comes first in the relationship. One has to go through pleasure to get to that pain. Not loving might keep away the pain, but that is not living either, as there would be no pleasure too, just a fossilised human being wallowing in their fear without any real life or joy.

Every experience in life has a purpose - to help us to be the best we can all round. When we deliberately resist experiences and fear to take risks we remain stunted in our growth without exposure to the new challenges in life which are essential for our development and evolution. It doesn’t take much to be an onlooker in life and do nothing. But the person who does nothing is usually nothing too, in fact rather insignificant and very bland, in the eyes of others.

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