Graphic by Saylor Hark

Recently, I saw a TikTok from author and creator Eli Rallo in which she shared advice she received about one of her college breakups.

She said someone told her something along the lines of: “But, it hurts so good, right?” 

The question seems inherently paradoxical, I mean, how can hurt feel good? The message was this: you still get to experience the other side of this pain. One day, you’ll get over this feeling, and all the pain will be proof that you are capable of loving another person so deeply. In college, we feel too young to be hurt this badly and too old to be missing all the red flags in another person that could’ve allowed us to avoid getting hurt.  

At 22, we are graduating from college, entering one of the most exciting parts of our lives and stepping into a world that is so much bigger than we know yet. A lot of us have no idea where we will be next year or what we will be doing. Aside from the pressure to figure it out, to get an apartment, a job or an email from the graduate school we hope to attend, we have our whole lives ahead of us to have our hearts broken again. Again, it feels paradoxical. Why would we want to ever experience heartbreak once more? A lot of us haven’t met the people who might love us the most, the people we might love the most. With that in mind, what a privilege it is to have a heart to break. 

Romantic relationships are some of the most consuming emotional activities that we engage in. Sometimes, they feel like the end-all be-all in our young lives. Falling in love is so wonderfully human, something that everyone will hopefully experience throughout their lives. These feelings surround us in so many ways. We watch movies that validate the importance of how deeply we feel things, make playlists based on whether we are in love or in heartbreak and cry to our friends when it all blows up. How can that hurt so good when it comes to an end? The person we care about most slips through our fingers, and we have to keep going to class. When your heart really gets broken, someone telling you “everything happens for a reason” or that your pain is just a testament to how deeply you can feel things seems like a useless attempt to make you feel more stable and optimistic. These statements can feel annoying sometimes, disingenuous even. They come from a played-out repertoire of clichés: time will heal all, you’ll get through this, everything happens for a reason, etc. But maybe, just maybe, they are onto something.

In my time at Colgate University, I have taken countless religion classes, and something we discuss often is the human condition. In other words, the fact that we go through life with the inevitable knowledge of our impermanence. It’s a strange sensation that we attempt to make sense of in our daily lives, whether or not we dwell on it or consider it in our actions. We look at cities as we fly over them and think about all the people who live there, living completely different lives from ours. We look at images of the ocean or of outer space and remind ourselves how small we are in comparison. How small our problems are. What a privilege that, among those huge impossible things, we have a heart that can be broken. 

In a way, we will never understand why we hurt, why we have to feel pain so deeply, but doesn’t it hurt so good? A condition of our impermanence is that life passes regardless of how we are feeling, and there’s something comforting in that. Time passes anyway, and in that time, we can feel things deeply. The emotional pain of heartbreak is something we find impossible to explain to others, yet we all know exactly what it feels like. At 22, the feeling seems permanent and impossible, but in three months, our lives will look completely unrecognizable from that of a Colgate senior. Nothing is permanent, not really. And the crazy thing is, you really do get over it on a random day.

So, doesn’t it hurt so good? We don’t really know what’s next, and we don’t really know what we are leaving behind, but we keep going. In our impermanence, we find so much to love and to lose. The time passes anyway, and we fill that time with so much. Our platonic relationships, our careers and success, our ability to love and to hurt. We define ourselves in how we feel for ourselves and for others, and sometimes that hurts us in ways we could never have seen coming, but doesn’t it hurt so good?