What is love? Why does it have to be so hurtful? How do I know if he is my true love who really cares about me and will never hurt me?

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Love, when you boil it down to the essentials, is when you integrate your life deeply with someone else’s. More deeply than the relationship you had with your siblings, or your parents, or your friends in high school or in adulthood.

It wasn’t always this way. Marriages used to be far more distant. Was a point in time even where you might see your mother more than your husband / wife. Things started to change as the world modernized and there was more of everything to go around.

People seem to desire far more compatibility from their life partners than they used to. It’s not enough that he has a good job, he also has to treat you well. It’s not enough that he treats you well, he also has to be romantic.

The problem is that each of these requires a lot of work. It takes work to be materially successful. It takes work to learn how to treat people. It takes work to learn how and why you have to be romantic. Then once you’re in a relationship, these things need to be maintained. Not everybody has it in them to do all four.

When you want something the other person can’t provide, that leads to you getting hurt. Because you need it, and instead of seeing how they can’t do it, you see it as how they won’t do it. That’s emotionally hurtful.

I answered a question recently about a girl who called a guy cheap because he wanted to go Dutch when eating out.

Vincent Guidry's answer to A woman I started dating, after a few dates, tells me that she wants to start out as just friends (both in 30s). I then told her that as long as we were hanging out as just friends, we need to go Dutch. She now thinks I am cheap. Am I wrong?

In it I articulate an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about. Her calling him cheap was just one observation of many that resulted in her not being romantically interested in him anymore. When you start seeing people more clearly, you look at just one of these instances and it’s enough to realize that they just don’t have it in them to be what you need or want them to be.

It doesn’t matter how many chances you give them, they just don’t see the world in a way that can allow them to behave according to your expectations. And you won’t be able to teach them how.

Until then you fumble around with different dates trying to figure out men / women work. The hurt comes from misplaced expectations. You should not have placed an expectation on somebody until you understood that he could live up to it. Learn to see people how they are, instead of how you want them to be.