We're The Only Ones Hurting: Why We Can't Help But Cry Over Assh*les

Everybody knows Rihanna was beaten by Chris Brown. She had black and blues all over her face. Then, on top of that, Chris had the audacity to immortalize the incident with a tattoo bearing her uncanny likeness on his neck.

Despite these unforgivable circumstances, Rihanna confessed to Oprah, with tears in her eyes, that he is the love of her life. But why would RiRi want to kiss the man who gave her scars? And how could someone who hurt her so badly still be considered the love of her life?

Logic says he shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t even be considered a man. Only cowards put their hands on someone else, but logic doesn’t apply to love. We can’t help whom our heart chooses, but we can try to understand why we hurt over people who are just not worth it.

Why do we sob over those who torture us?

We cry because we were wrong

We thought he or she was going to be the person we’d end up with, but we were sorely mistaken.

How did this happen? Well, love has a way of Photoshopping souls. When we like someone so much, our mind puts filters on the person. We manipulate the manipulator.

In this way, we see a halo where there are actually horns and wings where there is really a tail. Lucky for us, time and the person’s sh*tty character eventually erase the layers we’ve created until we’re left with his or her authentic image.

Once we see the unfiltered person, we get hit right between the eyes. We feel so completely and utterly stupid because we allowed ourselves to be blind and give our bodies and trust to unworthy people.

It’s embarrassing. We gave someone a flashlight to our darkest, deepest selves -- only to be left alone in the dark.

We cry because we can’t understand

It turns out those unforgettable times to you were just fleeting moments to this person. How? How could one person experience an event so differently than another?

How could the fireworks you experienced translate to nothing more than cigarette ashes to him or her? It knocks the wind out of us to even think about it.

We cry because assh*les change our futures without our permission

That map you had in your mind of your future has been scribbled all over. Your whole life has been rerouted and the prospect of your future family has been delayed.

It’s as though you're on a flight and the captain announces you will not be landing at your destination -- you’ll be landing at X instead. You never planned for X. X is scary. X is unexpected. X f*cking sucks because you were hoping for Y.

We cry because the assh*les, the ones who don’t care, also don’t hurt, and we know that

We know they aren’t the ones in bed crying until 5 am. Assh*les don’t go to work with swollen eyes and torn egos -- we do. They aren’t susceptible to heartache because their hearts are mechanical and unfeeling.

So, while we’re up at night posting sad r.m. drake love quotes, they’re out pitching cheesy pick-up lines. While we’re using tissues to cry our eyes out, they’re using tissues to jerk off.

We cry because we are addicted to a memory

We don’t want to focus on all of the venom this person pumped into our lives because it’s painful to remember. Instead, we replay all of the fun times shared: all of the memories when this person was a Garden Snake instead of a Black Mamba.

We know we shouldn’t, but we do. We live in the past as a shelter from our present.

We cry because we will never be the same

We are survivors of love. We mourn our former selves because once you have your heart truly broken -- and I mean truly -- an innocence is taken from you. True love becomes something like Santa Claus, something we believed in as children, but now know to be mythology.

We realize Grimms’ Fairy Tales are closer to reality than Disney because we’ve been given a period on what we thought would be an ellipsis. We’re traumatized, and our damage makes us cautious.

So the next time we love, we’ll hold ourselves back, make ourselves less vulnerable and love a little less because we know anyone can easily become a memory.