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“This Will Make You Get Over Your Ex!” - Why Love Hurts So Much?

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Being in love is like holding a candle. At first, it illuminates the world around you. Then it starts melting and hurting you. Finally it dies, and everything is darker than ever before, and the only thing you are left with is the burns. Apparently the one who said this statement must have had a lot of unpleasant experiences. Maybe some of you said, "This sentence expressed my feelings." Actually, you're not alone. An experiment was conducted on those who felt the same things. In other words, who broke up with their lovers and they were asked about their feelings. Some surprising answers were given.

I will tell you about the details of this experiment in a moment, but, don't you think that breakup stories are actually always the same? Doesn't the course of a relationship always work like this? In the early days, everything is going fine. You tell each other words of love, texting messages like good morning, sweet dreams, I love you. Then you want to see, you want to hold your lover's hand. You can't stop yourself in the midst of these intense feelings. As life is going on with him or her like this, you start your day again with a beautiful text message, but you receive another message in the evening. "I can't do this anymore." All of a sudden you are stunned, shocked.

That is a message you never expected. When everything was so good, what happened with this message? The life you dreamed of, the love you thought was beautiful and happy is turned upside down. Days pass, but you think about the thing that happened. You feel sad, you feel ashamed and you can't stop thinking about her. You say, "Why?" You try to make sense of it, but you can't find an answer. You feel her absence so much. Your heart is in pieces and you fall apart. Crying fits start. Maybe you start cursing her. But isn't this the person you uttered beautiful sentences to, the person you loved more than anyone?

The person for whom you said, "I will die for you." What happened that she killed your love and moved on with her life? What happened that you are in this state now? You hear about her from your friends. You think about the possibility of her loving another person. You get angry, you feel sick. You ask for help from your friends, but they say things like, "We told you so. How couldn't you realize?" Or things like, "You will forget over time. It'll pass." You say to yourself, "If only it were that easy." "If only this feeling would go away when I wanted to." Then it dawns on you, that having a relationship outside of marriage has always been impermissible in Islam anyway.

Perhaps my Lord wanted to prevent this pain I'm going through now. Nowadays, movies, TV series and social media tell us how enjoyable it is to flirt, but they never tell us how sad songs represent the pain it causes. Flirting is called forbidden love in Islam. When I say this, some of you might say, how can we get married then? How can you make this important decision without knowing that person first? Actually, it's not that Islam tells you get married without ever meeting. You'll get to know each other in the future anyway. No, this issue is completely misunderstood. I'll get to this in a moment.

But now I want to quote a statement related to this subject from one of the most prominent scholars of Islam, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. He says, "Forbidden love with many troubles such as the pain of jealousy, the pain of breaking up, and feeling an unreciprocated love, turns that little pleasure into a poisonous honey." From the outside, it looks delicious, but actually, it's a type of love that poisons you from the inside, and this poison leaves psychological damages behind. There are five main damages I'm going to talk about, but before explaining them, let me tell you the results of the experiment I mentioned to you in the beginning. The experiment about the feelings after breaking up.

They conducted this experiment on hundreds of people, most of whom are between the ages of 18 and 25. What they have in common is that they all had a breakup. Some of them were abandoned. Some of them were cheated on. Some of them broke up voluntarily, some broke up with mutual agreement, et cetera. When we look at the results, we notice this. Almost half of the relationships ended before even completing one year. Around 30% of them continued for 1 to 2 years. This means that, when the goal was not marriage but flirting, most of the relationships ended and they were not easy endings. Mostly they left an emotional damage behind.

Some participants of the experiment expressed their feelings with the following words. "Thoughts about her keep coming to my mind." "Thinking about memories of her takes up most of my time." "I feel sad when I think that we won't be together again." "I delay my daily tasks because I keep thinking about her." "No one will ever fill her space in my life." We also see this in the results. Only 18% of these relationships ended with mutual agreement. Do you know what this means? This means that in most of the breakups, one of them left the other. This might have happened because in dating, the majority of the individuals are not loved as much as they love the other person.

Couples feelings towards each other are not on the same level. Exactly like Bediuzzaman mentioned, there is the pain of unrequited love. Let's now talk about the five main psychological damages flirting causes. Remember the poisonous honey analogy? After the taste of honey passes, only the burning sense of poison remains. First, the pain of unrequited love. In other words, the pain of not receiving love as much as you give. We talked about this just now. When there is no serious bond between you and your partner, like marriage and the Halal Circle can you expect to be loved as much as you love? I don't think so. She didn't give you any promises about that.

Even if she did, how sincere could the promise be that is given in a haram relationship? Experience shows us, if you are looking for this in flirting, the only thing you will get will be disappointment. There is no guarantee for your love to be returned, so you will always have doubts in your mind. Second damage, depression. Inevitably, you are strongly connected to the other person and when this relationship ends, emotionally you are destroyed. Everything loses its meaning. Your life energy is drained, many things are disrupted, down to your eating and sleeping habits. You remember the moments you had together. The memories that made you feel happy before are causing pain now.

Even the most fun things in life don't give you any joy, because you have a pain you cannot get over. It's like your heart tells you with all its suffering, "Why did you dirty me with forbidden love?" You turned your heart towards someone other than its rightful owner other than Allah, to someone He didn't allow. And now He's punishing you like this. But do not forget. The punishment will surely be over someday. If you learn your lesson, the doors of repentance are wide open. If you repent, the pain you have felt will be a sign that your heart is healing. The punishment will end, and it will leave a purified heart behind.

Instead of trying to find the rays of the sun around you, you will turn your face directly to the sun now and your heart will come back to life again. Third, loneliness. You cannot tell anybody what you are going through, and even if you do, nobody understands it. You become introverted and you start feeling helpless and even worthless. There's a constant feeling of emptiness inside you. And sometimes to cope with this emotional pain, you want to cry. Your mind flashes back to the moment your relationship ended. You think no one in your life will ever fill her place. You're thinking all this, but how quickly you forgot that the only one whose place will never be filled is Allah.

Now, as a punishment for this, you are feeling lonely. Remember, the lesson repeats itself until it's learned. Then, without having to go through the same trial, take advantage of this loneliness and turn your face towards your Lord because only He can understand you. Fourth damage, despair. Just like cancer, it starts to grow inside you, as though you have lived your entire life with her. You don't know what to do without her anymore. You've lost your way. You want to forget. You don't want to remember, but you can't do it. You're unable to. You can't help it. Your heart is in pieces. But do not forget. Despair is for those who don't truly know Allah.

There's no room for despair for those who know Him. You had distanced yourself from your Rabb and this is how He reminded you of himself. And if He has now reminded Himself to you, the first person who should be hopeful is you. Then leave those who left you and those who are going to leave you. It's enough for you to know that your Lord hasn't left you. And the last damage, the pain in haram. Our Lord commands us in the 32nd Ayah of Surah Al-Isra. "Do not go near adultery." Here it is told that not just the final act of adultery, but we should stay away even from the ways that lead to it. Allah who created us, of course, is the one who knows us the best.

When such an intimacy occurs, we may be defenseless against our desires, our nefs and the devil. There are countless people who committed irreversible mistakes in this way. Haram love, however innocent it may seem, is the first step towards this major sin. So even dreaming of forbidden love can lead a person to the wrong path. While you have the chance to experience everything with your spouse for the first time, your previous life can overshadow it. On the one hand, holding her hand for the first time, traveling with her for the first time, experiencing all the firsts together, and on the other hand, not being able to offer her a very clean you.

Imagine you are spending time with your spouse and suddenly you remember your ex-girlfriend, that you did the same thing with. How long can you take it? Or would you want your spouse to have experienced the same thing with someone else in the past? Our Lord says in the 26th Ayah of Surah An-Nur, "Good women are for good men, and good men are for good women." Remember brother, sister, your choices today have the value to determine your future spouse. So Islam offers us halal love and a method of reaching it so that we don't suffer. For instance, Islam wants you to love your spouse and see her as an Amanah, as your eternal spouse in the Hereafter, and as someone who protects your faith.

The intention of a couple who loves each other for the sake of Allah is to gain the pleasure of Allah. Even death can't stand in the way of this relationship. Both should regard each other as companions on the road to eternity and companions in heaven. The difference between forbidden love and halal love is like heaven and hell in both worlds. Now it's time to answer the question that you might be very curious about. In a marriage like Islam told us, how could we know the other person? How can we get married? Without flirting, is it possible to really know somebody? Isn't that a risk? Let me clarify this issue. Islam doesn't say that you can only know each other after you get married.

There's a getting to know period before marriage as well. But what Islam does is that it brings seriousness and includes families in the matter. It takes precautions to prevent pain and mistakes. Men and women meet in such a way that they don't stay alone. They ask questions to each other. They are given the opportunity to get to know each other really well. They look at if there's an attraction between them. Then these meetings continue for some time, with questions asked, with understanding each other's mindsets, with looking at if their hearts are inclined to one another, this matter will come to a conclusion, or they can decide not to continue these meetings.

In flirting, people generally just want to have fun. But marriage is not all about this. Having fun together does not necessarily mean that he or she is the right person. These two people will go through hard times. They will have disagreements. There will be crises to manage. They will see all aspects of each other's personalities and if Allah grants them, they will then raise children together. You see, couples who flirt for years focusing on just feelings and desires may get divorced, saying "I thought I knew you." However, in the Islamic meeting process, this is not how it works.

The focus of both sides is not to convince the other person, but rather to try to decide if he or she is the right person. The goal here is to try to know the other person with every one of their positive and negative qualities. It's to learn from his or her friends and family about the aspects of them that you can and cannot get along with, to understand their expectations for marriage and the things they don't want in a marriage. In other words, it is to learn what you are going to deal with at the very beginning, so that both of you can build your relationship on a solid foundation. We humans are weak, faulty beings and we are not perfect.

But despite being imperfect, we are after perfect love and we expect to find that person wnotith the ways given by Allah, by the one who knows our heart and our needs best, but with our own ways. There is an analogy given by Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. Our situation is just like that. It goes like this. We boarded a ship and we are carrying some burdens in our hands. Normally what we should do is to travel by leaving our load on the deck, but we do the opposite. Until the end of the voyage, we say "No, I will carry my own burden." In other words, without realizing it, we are saying that we don't trust the owner of the ship.

Just like this, also on the issue of marriage, when we don't surrender ourselves to Allah, it is like we don't trust him. He knows us better than ourselves. He is capable of giving us whatever we need. Everything is in His power, not ours. He knows us better than ourselves. He is capable of giving us whatever we need. Everything is in His power, not ours. He knows the best and most appropriate for us, not ourselves. Then what could be more logical than obeying His command? If we pray and He wants to grant us a happy marriage, who can stop it from happening?

Since every situation we come across is actually like a message, a letter that tells us about Allah, marriage too is both a test and a letter to let us know Allah. The important thing is to understand the meaning behind these situations well. Let's finish the video with this question. If Allah is the one who creates happiness, then to reach happiness in marriage, shouldn't we look for our spouse according to the rules He set? May Allah grant all of us good marriages. Ameen.