Why Wuthering Heights Still Hurts

“I cannot live without my life! I cannot die without my soul!”

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you.” 

Catherine and Heathcliff on the moors. 

She lay on the bed, cold and grey, a sleep too deep for even true love’s kiss to awaken her, covered with a satin sheet in a blush pink that had once mirrored the delicate tones of her skin. 

Next to her, he lay broken. 

His beginning, his middle and his end lay beside him, gone in the cruellest way possible, and he had not even had the chance to tell her that he loved her. 

Theirs had never been a simple, gentle, everyday love that grows slowly over time. It was fierce. Passionate. Obsessive. A love that had engulfed him, consumed him still, and would continue to do so until he too moved on - doomed to wander the moors for eternity in search of what he had lost. 

In that moment, their beginning flooded back. 

He remembered the day he met her. A beautiful blonde child with eyes as blue as sapphires who had run rings around him since her father had taken him in. Wickedly intelligent. Bold. Defiant. Yet also innocent, chaste and wild in a way that made him feel less alone in the world. 

The memories blurred until one night stood still. 

The night he took a beating to protect her from her cruel, drunken father. 

He lay there, blood seeping through his worn linen shirt as she scolded him for his recklessness.

They were both so young. So untouched by pride.

When she asked what she could do, he asked her only to stay so he would not be alone. 

That was the first time he whispered that he would love her forever, believing her asleep, unaware that she was smiling quietly in the darkness.

For her too, life would never be the same again, but this was before the world intervened. 

Before pride and ego became armour. 

Before battle wounds were wrapped carelessly in bandages of status and power. 

Before vulnerability was mistaken for weakness and love hidden behind fortresses too fortified to enter and too lonely to inhabit. 

When did love stop being about choosing one another and begin to feel like winning? 

Why does adulthood convince us that we must become something impressive rather than simply remain connected? 

I have always loved this book. 

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff remains one of the most powerful depictions of tragic love in literature.

The wild, sweeping darkness of the moors mirrors the obsessive passion that saturates every page, but perhaps it is the tragedy of ego that lingers long after the final chapter. 

Maybe that is why that final scene affected me so deeply. 

The simple beauty of two souls who cannot live without one another, and yet, in trying to survive apart they destroy each other. It is devastating. 

Love was not merely lost. It was sacrificed in a battle of pride, but if we are honest, many of us still carry that earlier, more innocent version of ourselves within us.

The version that loved completely before fear interfered. 

Before we learned to measure worth by comparison. 

Before pride felt safer than honesty. 

Before ego disguised itself as strength. 

Perhaps Wuthering Heights still hurts because it reminds us not only of tragic love, but of the quiet responsibility we hold as adults.

To protect what is pure. 

To choose connection over conquest, and to never let ego speak louder than the instinct that once knew better.

The moors will always belong to Catherine and Heathcliff - their names forever whispered in the sound of the breeze, but for every one of us this story is a lesson.  

A lesson in choosing to protect the love we carry, regardless of status.

In holding onto the innocence we once held deep within our souls before the world attempted to replace it with pride and ego.

In understanding the responsibility we have to not only  remain true to our own hearts, but to honour the hearts of those we hold in our hands. 

We have the power to love them or to destroy them.  

The question is – which will we choose?