“I was in love… So what the hell was it that was so painful?”     
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Volume 2: Man in Love, p.217.

Connections between love and pain litter our language and literature. We often describe desire as an “agony,” we grow “lovesick,” and our hearts “break.” But, more recently, the intense physical symptoms associated with love have also been well documented in modern science. According to the latest neuroscientific research, both love and pain share a location, as both are activated within the brain’s anterior insula and anterior cingulate. New lovers lose their appetite and feel nausea, thanks, apparently, to the hyper-production of phenylethylamine; they are plagued by obsessive thoughts, which clinical psychologists have attributed to high levels of dopamine; and sometimes they even die from emotional distress, stemming from a condition that medical writers have termed “stress cardiomyopathy”.

How has the material connection between love and pain been interpreted throughout Western history? How have these biological and material aspects of love sparked the literary, religious, and mythological imagination? And what are the implications of these different ideas of love/pain for our modern definitions of love and material relations?

In Ancient Roman mythology, love was commonly described as a type of destructive wound. The god Cupid was imagined as firing arrows into the hearts of men and women, giving them “wounds” of desire that left them stricken. In one of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cupid bent down to kiss Venus and accidentally stung her with “a heedless arrow.” The goddess initially thought this was only a slight danger, but before long she found the arrow “too faithful,” and the wound “too deep” (Metamorphoses X) for her to bear. Transfixed by love for the mortal Adonis, Venus shunned all thoughts of heaven and followed him into the forest to become a hunter instead. Their love ended with tragedy, as Adonis was gored and killed by a boar. Venus tore off her clothes, cried with agony, and “with cruel blows… beat her guiltless breast.” The wound in her heart had turned sceptic, opening up a space of unimaginable pain and loss. But some redemption came, as Adonis’s blood mixed with Venus’s tears to create the Anemone flower, and thereafter the religious cult of Adonis.

One tradition in western discourse has maintained that there are two types of love, and that only the “lower” one of them, commonly recognized as misdirected desire or erotic lust, would cause the lover any amount of pain. The Corpus Hermetica, a second-century Greco-Egyptian religious text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, laid out this distinction clearly. “Love was the cause of death,” the Corpus said, so long as it was “expended upon the body” (Corpus Hermetica, 1: 18). By contrast, Hermes described a higher love that was explicitly non-corporeal. It was this love, he said, that expressed “the harmony that made the universe operate” (18: 14). Likewise, writing in the early 1800s, Goethe confounded the paradox of love-pain by splitting Cupid’s love wounds in two. When he described the “arrows of love,” he insisted that they came in two types. One produced a love-suffering that would destroy us, while the other would “ignite” the soul. “Some scratch us,” Goethe said, “and our hearts suffer for years from their slow poison.” But those other arrows, which were “strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points,” would instead “pierce to the marrow, and quickly inflame the blood” (Elegy, 2). The art of a discrete lover is to know which is which, and seek out the love that heals rather than wounds.

An alternative tradition, however, has insisted upon the inseparability of love and pain. In this view, ecstasy becomes heightened not in spite of the agony of desire, but rather because of it. If it is handled correctly, writers in this tradition have suggested, the pain of love itself works as a trial that can lead the individual on the path to wisdom and redemption. This view became particularly charged in the poetic works of medieval Christian mystics. As largely monastic writers, whose vows of chastity often left them at deep tension over the ethics of sexual desire, these mystics brought new dimensions to the bodily pain of falling in love. Hadewijch of Brabant (d.c.1210), a Dutch Beguine poet, described her love of God as excruciating. “I was so terribly unnerved with passionate love and in such pain,” she said, “that I imagined all my limbs breaking one by one and all my veins were separately in tortuous pain.” But Hadewijch embraced this pain as a blessing. Ultimately, she said, “above all gifts I could choose, I choose that I may give satisfaction in all great sufferings” (Vision 7, in McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism). Pain, she felt, was essential to finding satisfaction and resolution in love. Angela of Foligno (d.c.1300), an Italian Franciscan tertiary, went even further. When she described her love for God, she said that it burned as a fire that consumed her body. But Angela felt this fire as more than a metaphor, and her pain seems to have been more than just mental torment. When these feelings became too much, she said, she lit a flame and scorched her genitals to try and drive it away. As she explained, “I used to apply a hot flame… in order to extinguish that other fire.” (Memoriale, p.66).

As both Angela and Hadewijch seemed to insist, enduring the fiery pain of love was necessary as the very same force would eventually spur the lover to find eternal life. Augustine had written about love as a spark that could turn a person’s soul towards the will of God (Confessions, X). But maybe the most vivid account of this image appeared in the Roman writer Apuleius’s tale of Cupid and Psyche. After Psyche turned to see Cupid’s face one night in the lamplight, she scratched herself with one of his arrows and fell madly in love. But Cupid fled, and Psyche was left wildly adrift and tormented by her desire. Intervening, the god Venus set Psyche a series of tests that led her to the depths of Hell. (The Golden Ass, 4: 22). She was made to sort a heap of jumbled seeds into separate piles, retrieve the golden wool of a wild and violent sheep, and finally catch black water from the source of the river Styx. With each task Psyche despaired and attempted to commit suicide, only to be miraculously helped by a nonhuman force. Ants appeared to help her with the seeds, a riverbank reed spoke to her and helped her catch the golden wool, and an eagle swooped down to help her collect the water of the Styx.

Finally, all seemed doomed for Psyche when she succumbed to a near fatal self-love. She could not resist opening a box that Venus had told her contained the elixir of eternal beauty. But this was a trick, and after opening it Psyche was immediately sucked into a sleep that was meant to last forever. But finally, and in spite of all her dangerous mistakes, Cupid swept in and broke the sleep spell. Jupiter consented to the love, gave Psyche the ambrosia of everlasting life, and allowed the two to marry. After enduring intense agony, her love had turned to perpetual bliss. The ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan has described this story as giving us a roadmap for “how we can resist loss and tragedy” in the process of love (The Birth of Pleasure, p.3). But, especially seen in the light of Hadewijch or Angela, Psyche’s love trial seems to suggest something more paradoxical. As John Keats wrote in his poem on Psyche, it is precisely this “pleasant pain” that can “let the warm love in” (Ode to Psyche). We may argue conversely that love triumphs precisely because of the bodily stress and hardship it causes, rather than in resistance to it.

Finding a redemptive value in the pain of love, it seems, has always depended on historical appreciations of human frailty. Increasingly, modern practices of life management are trying to teach us that the object of love is pleasure, and that, aided by technology, we should be able to find this pleasure-love without any risk or anxiety. A problem with this is that it implicitly renders as pathological the traces of distress, pain, and loss that inevitably follow in love’s shadow. Desire, after all, is predicated on the agonizing possibility of not being recognized by the object of our affection. And just as love can inflame our spirits, it can only do so by burning us with obsessive thoughts, giving us vertigo, and inducing the fear of “heartache.” By imagining it without pain, we are in danger of reducing our definition of love to that of a secure contract between individuals. While this may be more palatable in the abstract, in practice it runs the risk of eclipsing an essential aspect of human (or human/material) relations.