Never in my wildest Delena dreams did I imagine that Damon would kiss Elena in the Season 2 premiere. I had seen various trailers on-line, and I knew there was a big scene between Damon and Katherine coming up which didn't particularly thrill me. (The scene wasn't half as bad as I thought it would be.) But the CW (and Kevin and Julie), flaunted the D/K make-out scene so much I was apprehensive about watching 'The Return'. On one hand I was excited about it, but on the other, I was worried that DE would take a backseat to what would be 'The Damon and Katherine Show'. I've never been so happy to be wrong in my life!

I thought DE were incredible in this episode. Their scenes together were absolutely riveting to watch - emotionally charged and heart-rending, even for DE. But it left a lot of DE shippers reeling, and no wonder: we went through a whole range of emotions in the last scene alone at lightning speed: breathless anticipation/excitement followed by shock ('He kissed her!), followed by disbelief ('Did that really just happen?'), followed by heartbreak ('This is SO sad...') I think one of the things that struck me most about DE in this episode was how well Elena understands and knows Damon. She describes with perfect precision how he reacts to emotional turmoil in spite of his outright denial that he 'doesn't get hurt.' Elena knows better. "You don't admit that you get hurt. You get angry, and cover it up and then you do something stupid," words which prove to be prophetic by the end of the episode. But it also showed us how well Damon knows Elena; maybe even better than she knows herself:

"You're surprised I thought you would kiss me back? You can't imagine that I would believe you would want to? You're the liar Elena. There is something going on between the two of us and you know it. And you're lying to me and you're lying to Stefan and most of all you're lying to yourself."

I thought that Elena's response to the kiss is worthy of some attention. Although she's bewildered and slightly stunned, she's not hostile or aggressive towards Damon. She doesn't slap him like she did in 1x03, raise her voice or become indignant. Instead, she tries to reason with him ("You're better than this"), and when that fails to have any impact, she emphasizes how much she cares about him. "I care about you, listen to me, I care about you! I do, but...I love Stefan. Its always gonna be Stefan." She is pleading, even tearful. She couldn't have chosen anything worse to say, but she didn't mean to be hurtful, and there was no way she could have known that she was echoing the exact same words Katherine had said to Damon. Perhaps she even used Stefan as an excuse because that was easier than admitting the truth.

While no-one can justify Damon's actions, we still feel deeply for him because we can understand the reasons behind his actions. He's never been truly loved by anyone - even his obsessive love for Katherine spanning 145 years was unrequited - and he's desperate for it. When Elena can't give him the love he craves, something in him must have snapped.
While I was working on this article, I remembered a quote from Robert Pattinson I'd read in a magazine which reminded me of Damon. (Ironic given that Rob was talking about Edward, I know.)

"He's essentially self-hating and prone to being self-destructive. And that's a very typical thing for guys to go through - when you love something so much that you just start compulsively destroying it because you think you're not good enough."

When Damon is hurt by other people, especially those he cares about and trusts, he instinctively lashes out in reckless, stupid ways. When he discovers Stefan and Elena have double-crossed him in 1x13 he force-feeds Elena his blood and threatens to turn her into a vampire. When Elena later gets kidnapped by Anna, he initially refuses to help Stefan search for her, telling him: "I mean this sincerely. I hope Elena dies." And after finding out that Katherine isn't in the tomb, he lets Alaric (and Elena) think he killed Isobel even though he didn't. Damon walks a fine line between his humanity and what it means to be a vampire in a way that Stefan doesn't. For someone who can switch off his humanity, feeling any emotional torment that comes with it must be deeply troubling and unwanted. When someone he cares about hurts him, the only way he knows how to deal with that pain is to hurt them in return. Rejection is one of the worst things anyone can feel, and to be rejected twice for the same reason must have been brutal.

What makes the kiss scene (I don't know what else to call it), even more heartbreaking is when Elena says: "He doesn't want to feel, he wants to be hated, it's just easier that way." It's not true; we can see from the desperate way he kisses her that all he's ever wanted is her love. The ending may well have left at least some DE shippers despondent, but if anything, 2x01 made me even more excited about Delena, because it showed how much Damon needs Elena, and that she is the only person who really, truly understands him and can give him the love he needs.