Love is beautiful. It is extremely colorful; although it is simply one emotion, it carries many feelings within it. Loving others is fulfilling and what I believe makes our lives worthwhile and complete. Feeling love from others is just as rewarding and is something we all crave in friendships, family, and significant others. Many come to find out that every form of relationship comes with hardships and compromises, but these relationships are also the things that keep us connected to one another. This article focuses on the hard lessons that are learned through loving, and it challenges the notion "Is love worth the suffering?"

Love comes with choices.

Just as life comes with prioritizing, so does relationships. You will be presented with choices of choosing between one person or another, your friends or your significant other, and that choice can come with consequences. Not only will you have to choose between others and how to manage both a relationship and your friendships, but you will have to make choices with someone else. Being in a relationship is about choosing that person every day, no matter what. You can love someone and not choose them, which is what makes loving easy and relationships hard. Love also brings other people and factors into the decisions you make, so you have to prioritize what is more important to you. Make sure you remember to factor in yourself in these decisions and not just the other people in your life; you are a choice in these decisions as well.

Love is selfless.

This contradicts what I just said, but the statement still stands true. When you love someone you often become fixated on their happiness while also being concerned with your own. A friend told me that loving someone made her understand the hypothetical situation of "jumping in front of a bus for someone else." Love helps you understand how to care about another person and it can get to the point where you would do anything if it meant they would be happy. Being selfless doesn't mean disregarding your well-being and happiness, but it means that you often put their needs above yours. This can turn into a harmful thing, but it doesn't when you find that balance with the right partner. You might be thinking, "How do I know it's the right person?" The answer is found with time.

Loving another does not always equal happiness.

Love brings so much happiness into your life that nothing else can, but that does not mean that loving someone will make you happy. There will be relationships and friendships where love is present, yet you often find yourself upset and sad and having issues. Relationships are hard but you have to decide if that relationship is worth working through the issues or if it is just depleting yourself. The most important type of love is loving yourself, and often too many people give so much love to others and have none for themselves. You have to love yourself before you can give love to another person. You cannot depend on someone else to think you are beautiful and to think you are incredible the way you are. You have to believe that fact for yourself, and when you do, true happiness will come from within and you can share it with other people.

Sometimes love won't be enough.

This is a hard lesson to learn. You can give all your love to another person and feel like loving is enough to make them stay, but sometimes it isn't. Love is not the only component to a relationship but sometimes that is all there is left. Relationships are something both people have to be present in and willing to be a part of. There may come a time where the other person or you feels it's not something you want to be in anymore. Coming to terms with this on both ends can be difficult, but it is necessary. You can love someone and know that you cannot be in a relationship with them anymore. Love is strong and powerful and it's something that never dies but only evolves. It evolves into a different kind of love, one that has to be done from afar.

Love might be temporary.

The love you have for someone will always be present, but it will be different as you change and grow. The part of love that is temporary is the type. You can be best friends with someone and have an enormous amount of love for them and the friendship, but as you both grow and venture onto different things, the friendship might change. You still love them but this love turns into a thankfulness and a care for their well-being. You show your love in different ways, like instead of talking on the phone everyday you catch up every once in awhile over coffee. In a relationship when you break-up, you still have an intense love for them. Overtime, though, this love evolves into an appreciation for what you did have. Being in love is a special and epic thing and it doesn't have to last forever for this to be true. Losing a relationship with someone you spent a long time getting to know is extremely hard and it can take awhile to move on. I had a hard time accepting how a love so beautiful was temporary, but I had to learn that the beauty has to be admired through a different lens. This lens shifted from one of being in love to simply having love for the person.

Love will change you.

As relationships come and go, and as love shifts and evolves, you will change. From every feeling you experience and every person you encounter, you learn more about yourself and the world and in return, you grow. With loss you may feel like you are changing for the worse, but I guarantee you are changing for the better. Having to go through hard emotions can feel very raw, but it helps us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Every day we continue to become another version of ourselves with the choices we make and the people we allow into our lives, so we have to choose to become better. Allow love to change you for the better.

Here is where we face the question: Is love worth the suffering? Learning these lessons comes with heartbreak, loss, and pain. In order to learn these lessons you have to experience love. Would I go back and do it again? Absolutely. The love I have experienced was epic, beautiful, and real. It taught me so much about myself and relationships and I'm very thankful for that. I always will be. I hope everyone will choose to love and will choose to learn these lessons that will lead you to the next ones.