Love, much too often, gets painted yellow with happiness and red with passion, but love is more than that. Love is a labyrinth of hard times, anger, sadness, and obstacles.

The unedited truth about love is that the darkest corners are pitch black and filled with hurt and pain and mistakes and regrets. Love comes with being let down, being cheated on, being lied to, feeling like the heart in your chest will pop out.

Love is being so hurt that you feel absolute numbness.

Loving someone is giving bits and pieces of your heart to someone who may not appreciate the gesture or care enough to replace those pieces with pieces of their own.

People hurt people more than reality kills dreams, and there is no guarantee that your heart won’t break even the tiniest bit when you’re walking around with a heart on your sleeve.

The dark truth about being in love is that love will always be mistaken as weakness, but living without it would be dull.

Love has dark twists and turns like all good novels and all perfect hurricanes. Nothing is safe from pain, not even the love your heart gives. The truth about love is that the only thing that can heal a broken heart is love itself.

Love is all consuming even when it isn’t painted yellow or red, but deep blues and blacks. The darkest part about love is that it hurts at the same rate in which we fall in love: fast and hard. It has no mercy, not even for the kindest of souls.

I grew up hearing, “Where there is light, there is dark.” But it took falling in love and going through the ups and downs and heartbreaks to really understand what that meant.