You Don't Know What Love Is

The lyrics describe love as something understood through painful experience, especially loving someone who is then lost. The speaker begins with a firm claim that sorrow teaches a person what love means. As the song develops, the focus moves from heartbreak to its lasting effects: fear of remembering, sleepless mornings, and feelings that remain even when the relationship cannot continue.

The “blues” suggests sadness as well as a way of expressing it. “Lips that taste of tears” links kissing with grief, while the idea that they “lose their taste for kissing” implies that sorrow can make intimacy feel difficult or empty. The paradox of a love that “cannot live yet never dies” means the relationship may be over, but the attachment or memory continues.

The repeated statement that “you don’t know” may sound certain, but the final question makes the meaning less simple. The speaker could be insisting that heartbreak is necessary to understand love, or speaking from personal pain and turning that experience into a broad judgment. The lyrics do not explain why the love ended, or whether the lost love might return. Instead, they emphasize the lasting tension between knowing love through loss and still carrying feelings that have nowhere to go.