According to Ben, “Hurt Me Once” is about when “You can feel that it’s not working and neither of you really wants to admit it and so you’re overly kind to each other and slowly remove yourself just to get some distance, sort of forcing the other person to bring it up, rather than a painful, confrontational, one-time conversation and just nipping it in the bud, because you are kind of afraid of that.” He explains the reason for this behaviour is simply that, “That can be ultimately more painful than just having that very difficult conversation.”