"is it better to be hurt with the truth than to be comforted with a lie."
Yes, i believe so, but there are many ways of expressing the truth and many aspects of the truth you can express or highlight. You can make the truth more pleasant without sugar-coating it sometimes by including other truths that mitigate it or by telling the *whole* truth about how you feel, including the aspects based in love. There are also more and less legitimate *motivations* for telling the truth. If your motivation is negative, or if you're just a harsh or insensitive person, the truth is going to be abrasive.
Often I think we belie how we really feel when we point out something negative. We don't immediately see how we could express the whole story, including the love and positive aspects, so we get caught in a drama of "okay now I have to hurt you" and may not even realize that what's conferred doesn't do justice to what's felt. Instead it's just chalked up to the necessary element of general ugliness in human interaction or to the person conveying the truth being imperfect or having some kind of self-perceived fault due to apparently feeling a way that's going to hurt another person.
More generally, I think humans do or say things for reasons that they don't fully understand, and then as a result fall into the role of being what they think the thing they did or said implies about their nature or character.