The side effects of love:

The comfort of love can be as harmful as the softness of water, which is known to drown many lives. Because something is good doesn’t mean that it’s free of toxic effects. There’s no barrier to prevent the toxic thoughts, feelings, and actions of people from seeping into the way they love, causing love to have toxic side effects.

Losing self to love is a common side effect of love, which many are forced to face even after the spell which love had on them is long gone. While falling in love, some people let go of their purpose as easy as they let go of their name in matrimony. Others lost their way of life to the magnetic pull of love. For when the two become one in love, one of the two tends to lose self to love.

Being in love is like having an open heart surgery; one has to trust another with the most vulnerable and vital part of his or her being, hoping this person won’t betray that trust. But when one opens self to love, one also opens self to betrayal, a side effect of love. Betrayal is a hurt — quake which tears open the core of the soul, causing a hurt that’s too deep to be refilled by love.

Blind spots are as natural to the mind as shadows to the body. But they widen when we fall in love, giving cover to unfaithful actions and ill intentions. When we first fall in love with someone, we search their lives extensively with the light of curiosity, but even a light as bright as the sun misses the bottom of the ocean, the deepest and darkest part of the earth. As Arthur Schopenhauer stated, “…people are like the moon: they show you only one of their sides…” By widening the blind spots of the mind, love helps to hide its lover’s hidden side.

While love widens blind spots, it also shortens memory. The shortening of memory is a side effect of love, which causes some people to forget that they knew how to be happy before they met the person who they love. So they cannot see themselves being happy outside of love. For love has shortened their memories, leaving out the fact that they were once happy before it.

Love is like water; it takes on the shape of its holder. So its expression cannot be purer than the person who expresses it. If the person who is expressing love doesn’t feel whole, then the love which he or she expresses will inevitably have unwholesome side effects.