Love is pain

Liddle Sis is still in the painful throes of a freshly minted breakup. It is a peculiarly intense kind of pain, the one you can only have when you are still at university and you are wide-eyed enough to be pained at the injustice of it all, rather than just feel sorry for yourself. She is asking me questions that I cannot answer:
"Why isn't it that love isn't enough for two people to be together? It's just so sad!"
"How can you bear this sort of pain? I know I'll be OK in the future but right now I'm hurting!"

Ah, Liddle Sis. If I had the answers to all that, I would have set up an online agony aunt column and people would pay me a fortune and I'd no longer have to worry about being holed up in some hotel room with complete nutters for company for three weeks again. It's painful to see you going through all the sorrow and grief. Love hurts! You feel pain! And yet when it's all over and you think your heart is completely dead inside you, you fall in love yet again, break up painfully once again, and you throw your heart out onto the streets swearing you'd never do it again, and so it goes on and on until you find the right person. Not that there's ever any guarantee that there will be the 'right person' out there, of course. This is why some people, like Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude, become so afraid of their own hearts that they never give it to anyone, and die forever lonely.

But I know you are not cowardly, or mean, or self-absorbed like that. I know you will find someone who will love you so much they will give you their soul, and you deserve that, because you are a such a considerate and understanding person. You tell me (your older sister by six years who ought to have more sense) to start saving money, to stop drinking so much, you listen to ultrabioman and calm her down even though you are bent under the load of all your homework. How many little sisters do that? How many little sisters think so hard about other older people's stuff when they have to deal with their own stuff?

I know it's painful right now, but you can see it through.