During my sickness, I've had some time on my hands. I was surfing the web and I stumbled onto a blog. The post asked a question that many people have asked (in many forms): "When do you resign yourself to being single?" That is, when do the risks of falling in love (the heartache, the rejection, the pain, etc) outweigh the benefits? How many times do you crash and burn before you put away the wings?
So, thanks to that question and a lot of time on my hands, I have decided to make a stab at an answer. I have no qualifications as an expert on this topic, which makes me perfect. God forbid if someone takes this post seriously. My regular readers, or even those who stumbled onto this blog by some unforseen circumstance or by mistake, please excuse me for this Dr. Phil meets Bartlett's Book of Quotations post.
Those of you who have been in multiple bad relationships, you probably have the "I hate love" mentality. It's best expressed by the following quote by Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman and Anasazi Boys:
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
Of course, after such an experience, one probably doesn't want to go though those crappy emotions again. It's quite understandable. Wouldn't it be nice if all relationships were guaranteed to be perfect? That everything about it would be just the way we wanted it? No risk of broken hearts. No risk of being hurt. Sorry to tell you this, but it's just not possible. Inherent in all relationships, especially those involving love, means taking those risks:
If you don't become vulnerable and accept the risk, your heart will never be broken by another person, but you destroy it yourself. It leads to a kind of apathy to relate to other people. One will lose the capacity to risk one's self in the hope of achieving any kind of meaningful relationship with another person. Risk is unescapable. If one person changes, the other person will change. How much is not known, but the other person will change.Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable
-C.S. Lewis
It's so easy to say "I love you," but so hard to show it. People can buy flowers and dinners, but in other ways, it's nearly impossible to do.
Anything that can be seen as exposing the inner self--the hopes, the dreams, the more personal details--are seen as a sign of weakness that can be used. This stems from two types of fear that the psychoanalyst Otto Rank termed "life fear" and "death fear." The first is a fear of being an individual, the fear of being abandoned. A person with the fear throws themself so much into the relationshp, trying so hard to please the other person by being a reflection of the other person, that they lose a sense of they they really are. The second fear is the fear of losing one's independence, the complete opposite of the first. People with this fear have secret back doors installed in their relationship so they can run away if things become too serious.
Love requires courage. Courage requires being fully committed, but being all too aware that things might be possibly wrong. We might be wrong in pursuing this. This doubt is healthy. Being absolutely convinced is dangerous and unhealthy. It requires quieting the doubts of others and personal, unconscious doubts as well. That is real courage. To pursue something in spite of doubt.
When do the risks outweigh taking risks? Never. Not being capable of love is abnormal. To purposely hide yourself from love for fear of being hurt is abnormal. With love, you have to take the risks that come along with it. You have to risk being vulnerable. As Jalal ad-Din Rumi said, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
Well, that was a little too...well...philosophical. More regular posts will come later. That's all for now.
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