10 Love Songs That Are Actually Incredibly Dark

For as long as the concept of song has been around, we still haven't really seemed to come to an agreement about love. The Beatles have told us that love was all that we needed way back in the day, and you also have someone like Pat Benatar saying that love is a battlefield. It would be better to just say that love is a complicated emotion, but it can get downright dark some of the time as well.

Even though you can call every song on this list a love song, they do not detail their emotions in the best way. Across every one of these tracks, the relationships in question are either on the rocks or heading on a downward spiral that isn't going to be getting better any time soon. Then can you call them breakup songs? Well, not exactly. Breakup songs give us a little bit of context of what went wrong, and each of these relationships are still playing out while you listen.

As the song unfolds, you get to hear a lot more details about what this person is going through, and who knows whether they'll actually end up happy by the end of the song. Still, it's better to have at least experienced love once than to have never had it at all, and this is the moment where love starts to get really messy.

Amid the '00s emo rock scene, bands definitely had their fair share of hearts on their sleeve. Even if all the song was trying to say was the inner pain they were feeling inside, you couldn't stop paying attention to songs from My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy if you had tried. There were some love songs sprinkled in the mix though, just not the kind that you'd find on a Valentine's Day card.

Although the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus have rebranded themselves more as a Christian band these days, their hearts were already in the right place with Face Down, talking about a woman who has fallen on hard times. This isn't the Livin on a Prayer style of poverty life either. This woman is going through a full on abusive relationship in these lyrics, with her face being put down in the dirt as this waste of space man treats her like trash in any way that he can.

For a genre that was always known to exhaust the same love songs out of their fans, this was a much stronger leap forward for the genre, choosing to stand by and take abusers to task for what they've done. There's even an optimistic twist towards the end, where they hope that this woman finds the strength to tell her abuser that she has had enough. That might seem a little easier said than done, but here's hoping that this story ends the way we hope: with this woman finding peace and this man being left on his ass.