What Happens When Cupid Hits You With an Arrow?

What happens when Cupid hits you with an arrow? Cupid, the Roman god of love, is often depicted with a bow and arrows. He represents something undeniable in human experience: when we fall in love, we feel pierced — wounded, smitten, and yet strangely alive. Beauty never misses the mark — it strikes us awake.

When we are struck by beauty, it wounds us in the heart. When Cupid shoots, it’s never hit-or-miss. We may lead a loveless life for years on end until, out of the blue, something catches us completely off guard. We stand in awe and suddenly realize there’s no going back.

The mythic intuition behind Cupid’s bow and arrows is this: all of life is archery. We aim at happiness in everything we do—and we often miss. The Greeks named this failure ἁμαρτία (hamartía), from the verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartánō)—“to miss the mark.” In later Jewish-Christian Greek, hamartía becomes the standard word for “sin.”

When we hear the word “sin,” we hear all sorts of moral connotations. Not so in classical Greek. In Greek, anyone who missed the mark had “sinned.” Sin is what humans do: we hit and miss. We shoot — and miss the mark. We shoot at happiness but don’t get it. That is sin.

The Russian word погрешность (“margin of error”) still shares the root грех (“sin”). Погрешность simply means a limit of error. And yet, paradoxically, there is no limit to human error — unless we open ourselves to being wounded. Beauty never misses the mark; its mark is our hearts.

We shoot for happiness but miss it; it cannot be achieved that way. Happiness dwells at the point of Cupid’s arrow when it comes swooshing out of the blue. To be happy, we must open our hearts to divine arrows.

The only way to protect ourselves from the fiery darts of the Evil One is to make ourselves completely open to the arrows of God. The only way to “sin less” (as in: miss the goal of happiness less) is to allow yourself to be smitten by the One who doesn’t miss.

“Sinning less” is not a matter of effort — our own shooting — but of letting go of all shooting and allowing yourself to be pierced. The fiery darts of the Evil One make us close our hearts. When we are wounded by the poisoned darts of the Evil One, we shut down and stop feeling.

Refusing to feel is the ultimate sin (missing the mark), because by “not feeling” we take our last, desperate shot at some form of “happiness.” Paradoxically, the only true antidote to the poison of satanic darts is Divine love — Cupid’s arrows. When enough Divine arrows pierce our hearts, the poison in satanic darts is neutralized.

One of Estonia’s national parks is divided into several sections — each dedicated to a particular kind of silence. The idea behind the park is that people need to hear the many voices of silence. Each voice opens the heart to be wounded by Divine love.

Cupid doesn’t waste his arrows — he doesn’t shoot at a closed heart. He waits until we have taken all our shots at happiness and become desperate and brokenhearted. A broken heart is much closer to healing than a closed one.

A broken heart can feel. It is vulnerable enough to receive Cupid’s healing arrows. When we are vulnerable and open, we do not miss the mark. We wait in silence for the swoosh of God’s healing arrows to smite us and bring us back from the dead.