I came across an image on Tumblr of a garage door that had been spraypainted with the phrase "Love is cruel".
It struck me as an oxymoron, considering that love is how we AVOID
being cruel to each other; St. Paul's discussion of the matter puts love
in a position that would never give anyone the chance to say that love
and cruelty are one. Admittedly there are harsh things people can DO to
each other out of love, and this is known as "tough love", but it is
done with the expectation of a beneficial outcome. Cruelty is toughness without love.
Then again, it's a rough thing to get dumped, and the person who
scrawled paint on the door was probably thinking of love in the petty sense of "romance". Most likely it was the person's own infatuation that betrayed them. Romance, crushes, infatuation, whatever
you want to call the immature sort of attraction that we've come to call
"love" after listening to it in a hundred different songs produced by Phil Spector.
Eros is cruel, but here's a lot more to love than Cupid's stupid arrows. People try to keep each other alive without even knowing them. Couples in arranged marriages learn to love each other. Children forgive their parents far more than they should. Love is an expansive enough concept that the ancient Greeks had to come up with four different words for the specific types; English speakers tend to prioritize Eros and forget Storge, Agape, and Philia. And then when they get burned by Eros they say such things as "Love is cruel" and accidentally slander the remaining facets.
I wonder if this is a legacy of the Troubadors and how they sang about Courtly Love.