When love starts to hurt: On seeing clearly and choosing yourself

There are few betrayals more destabilising than the ones that happen slowly. Not the shock of infidelity, not the loud kind of rupture, but the gradual erosion of not being seen and heard. 

The realisation that something once tender has become sharp. That the relationship you’re in, romantic or otherwise, no longer nurtures but consumes. 

The question, then, is not just how we leave, but how we learn to see clearly enough to know we should.

The quiet forms of harm

This is for anyone who’s ever convinced themselves that pain is the price of staying. Who has rewritten narratives in their head to protect the “idea” of someone else. Who’s stayed long after the warmth left the room. Who’s said, “It’s not that bad” even as their chest tightened with every compromise. 

Seeing clearly, in these moments, isn’t instinct. It’s work. And it’s often delayed.

We don’t talk enough about the kind of harm that doesn’t come with bruises or yelling. The kind that builds through silence. Through control masked as care. Through manipulation that mimics concern. These aren’t stories that make headlines. But they’re the stories that quietly unmake people. That shrink them over time. That turn self-doubt into ritual. That teach people to ask, “What’s wrong with me?” before they ever ask, “What’s being done to me?”

What makes this kind of pain so difficult to leave is how ordinary it looks from the outside. The world doesn’t rush to rescue someone who’s “just not being listened to”, or someone whose joy is always secondary, whose boundaries are dismissed, whose voice is made small. 

But make no mistake, erasure is a form of harm too. And those who’ve lived it know exactly how long it takes to name it.

When love starts hurting 

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being unseen inside of intimacy. You are present. You are giving. You are trying. But you are not recognised. You become a ghost in your own life, a hologram, not quite seen. Touched, but never really held. That too, can be harmful.

There comes a moment, sometimes quiet, sometimes thunderous, when love starts to wound more than it warms. When the stories we’ve told ourselves about what it means to hold on begin to fold. 

The hardest part isn’t even walking away. It’s looking at the person in front of you and acknowledging that love is no longer the thing binding you, at least not the kind of love that makes you breathe.

Clarity doesn’t fall down from the sky. It doesn’t arrive fully formed, wrapped in certainty. It creeps in. Through exhaustion, through sleepless nights, through the quiet realisation that things are not getting better. That this isn’t a rough patch. That this is the shape of it.

Often, we resist. We tell ourselves it will pass. That we’re imagining it. That it’s not that bad. But over time, clarity gathers and when it finally settles, it becomes harder to unsee what we’ve spent so long trying not to.

What we do with the truth

Looking at the pain that others inflict on us and the harm that we cause others is no easy thing. We believe we see the world as it is, but in truth, we see only what we are able to see, what we are willing to let into our consciousness. To truly look at something, to really see it, is to bring it closer, even if it remains out of reach. 

And sometimes, what we see forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew. The act of seeing a lover as something other than what we thought them to be is not a moment, but a journey. A slow, painful shedding of illusions. A process of unlearning, of peeling away the layers of perception that once made him seem kind, safe, or even extraordinary. It cannot be rushed. There is no single revelation, no sudden arrival at truth.

It’s not easy. No one ever said it would be. But clarity, once you have it, rarely lets you go back to pretending. It whispers in the quiet moments. It sits at the dinner table. It walks beside you as you question whether it was really that bad. And it answers, “Yes. It was.” 

So maybe this isn’t a story about heartbreak, after all. Maybe it’s about reclamation. About the radical act of seeing clearly and choosing, again and again, not to look away.

Sometimes we stay because we’ve been told that love is meant to be hard. That commitment means sacrifice. That to bend and bend and bend is some kind of virtue. 

But let’s be honest: if love asks you to disappear in order to survive it, it’s not love. It’s erosion. We learn to measure love by endurance. But that’s not love. That’s survival. And no one should have to survive their own relationship.

Let the tide change its mind

So here’s what I’m learning: we don’t always get to choose when heartbreak enters the room. But we do get to notice when love has begun to wound more than it soothes, when the ache of staying eclipses the ache of letting go. 

And in those moments, something inside us shifts. Not all at once. But gently, like a tide changing its mind. Sometimes the real act of love is the release , the moment we loosen our grip, not out of indifference, but because the holding has started to hurt. 

Because staying has begun to cost too much of who we are. And maybe that’s one of the strange graces of being human: that even in the quiet wreckage of love, we get to gather the pieces and begin again. 

Our story doesn’t end with the breaking. Sometimes, that’s where the real narrative begins, in the slow rediscovery of our own voice, in the soft return to ourselves. Not unmarked, but still intact. Still here. DM

This piece is based on some of the ideas discussed in Joy Watson’s upcoming book, Because I Love You, to be published by Jonathan Ball in early 2026.

Joy Watson is a Daily Maverick contributor; she has worked as a researcher and policy advisor to national states as well as in the global policy arena. Currently, she works for the Institute for Security Studies and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative. Her debut novel, The Other Me, was a finalist for the UJ Prize in 2023.