I'm not so sure if Alfred Lord Tennyson was totally on target when he wrote, " 'Tis better to have love and lost, than to have never loved at all." Try using that phrase as a source of comfort for someone going through a breakup, and you just might get cursed out. Written in 1850, the words have now have become one of the most commonly recited love cliches today. But is losing a love actually better than never experiencing what love is?

Take a trip down memory lane, and think back to when you fell in love for the first time. Remember the butterflies, the novelty, the innocence? Then whap! The inevitable first break up. The confusion, the sickness, the pain. Or what about those who love someone, and then find themselves losing that person through more uncontrollable elements, such as distance or death? Losing a first love can feel like being confined in a torture chamber. It doesn't kill you off, but it slowly eats away at your soul. The experience -- both the highs and lows -- can be very pivotal in the way we choose to love and who we choose to love in the future. Whether having a love end by choice or by circumstance, it seems harder to endure than staying in state of romantic ignorance.
Although it is better to have experienced the joy that being in love brings, the cliche, even in it's poetic context, doesn't make this about experiencing love versus never experiencing the feeling of love. The operative word Tennyson used was "lost," and losing a love cannot be compared to the "safety" of never knowing what love brings. For how can you miss, or be pained by something you never experienced?

From an emotional standpoint, loving and losing invariably brings pain. If one does not love, one will not lose, and thus one will not have pain. However, for those who have more idealistic views, you could make the argument that you haven't lived until, you have loved. A world without romantic love is still possible and realistic -- lonely, and maybe not as favorable -- but still realistic.

Analyzing matters of the heart with science will often clash, but scholars of marriage have a ready response: People who have always been single have not experienced the same depth of stress (or crisis or loss) as people who have divorced or become widowed. If you accept this data is truth, then never to have loved at all yields far better results in life -- logically. However, we all know most people disregard logic when it comes to matters of the heart, and after balancing both sides of the coin, it's worse to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all... until you love again.