‘Love hurts, love scars,’ the hard-rock band Nazareth sang in their 1974 international hit version of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s widely covered anthem. The song expresses a particular kind of love: passionate or romantic love (instead of companionate love, sibling love, love between friends, parental love or godly love). A hurting, fiery love is, to be honest, a staple variety in the love-song genre.

There seems to be widespread cultural agreement that when it comes to this type of love, a risk exists for emotional turbulence when an individual is madly in love. It is crucial to underscore that it is psychological injury – meaning emotional pain, mental distress, verbal abuse, neglect and other forms of non-physical violence, instead of physical violence – with which we are concerned in this case. A culture that accepts that deep love can hurt, or will hurt, we must note, not only covertly reinforces emotional violence as part of love; it also suggests to us that psychological pain is not as bad as physical pain.

In their book Masters and Johnson on Sexuality and Human Loving, the acclaimed sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson and their collaborator, Robert Kolodny, write: ‘The great loves of fictions and verse have been romantic loves marked by a whirlwind of emotions from passion to jealousy to anguish.’ One undergraduate psychology textbook says that ‘for many people, passionate love resembles a ride on a kind of emotional roller coaster – they experience intense joy if the feelings are reciprocated, and intense pain and despair if the feelings are unrequited’. Therefore, it seems passionate love is perceived to come with the possibility of pain. (That is why the dominant narrative for this love uses the phrase falling in love; we risk falling and hurting ourselves.)

Do we not gain from assuming that love carries with it the risk of distress? Do not many of us suffer from unreciprocated love, the unwelcome absence of the beloved, the ending of love, losing a loved one? Pain is never far off in this kind of love.