To Love is Risky, To Not Love is Foolish
To love is risky…
Afterall, the most precious part of you- your heart, is to be put at stake.
Offering someone your heart, is in other words offering them the power to hurt you, to betray you, to break you, in all ways, inside and out. Metaphorically, Love is taking a step forward without knowing what lies ahead. It’s both, breathing deeply and forgetting how to breathe at the same time, yet trusting that you’ll catch your breath when you fall into someone else’s arms.
This ‘Love,’ however, comes with some unspoken terms. It requires allowing not just yourself to be shared, but also your vulnerabilities, your inner thoughts, your hopes, emotions, your true self. The more love you want to give and receive, the more you must allow yourself to be shared on deeper levels. That right there, is the risky paradox of ‘love’.
To be loved is just as risky; perhaps they’re two sides of the same coin.
To allow yourself to feel loved, you need to love yourself first, at least to a certain degree. In today’s world, with insecurities taking over everyone’s hearts and minds, loving oneself is not as easy and common as it should be ideally.
Even with the evidence of prior partners loving you despite your insecurities, despite your flaws, you still shut yourself from your love. Why? You’re scared of them loving you deeply because you struggle to love yourself.
Allow me to explain. Insecurities take over such a major part of your life that they start affecting every other little aspect of it too, love being a major one of them. It’s not easy. The fear, the anxiety of them not loving you because of your flaws is a constant. If that fear does come out to be true, which by the way, hate to break the ice, is a possibility in every relationship whether you love yourself or not, pain, disappointment, heartbreak, all take over.
Hence, we often prevent ourselves from being truly in love. We stop ourselves from experiencing the raw passion, intimacy, and connection with them, and even ourselves. You constantly withhold your feelings and attachment from growing, because of the fear, and hence subconsciously also begin to sabotage your own relationship. This again is bound to create issues.
Protecting your fragile heart may keep it, and your feelings safe, but at the cost of what? Is it worth it? Yeah, sure you won’t get hurt, but if you’re unwilling to love unconditionally, are you truly alive?
What is life truly without a mix of all these emotions? Just like the saying goes, ‘you must experience pain and sadness to experience the feeling of true happiness’, if you don’t allow yourself to feel heart-broken, how do you know what having your heart loved unconditionally by someone actually feels like? There may be a resistance to explore and risk the unknown world of the other person’s heart. But here’s the catch.
Risk is attached to every aspect of life, to every decision you take. After all, to live itself is to risk dying; So does one not live at all? Does that mean you always take the safe road? Would you ever know what’s at the end of the riskier road? It’s not worth dismissing it simply because it is risky or difficult, most things worth having usually anyways are. Hence, restricting oneself owing to some “fear” may be a foolish move. Chained by your own enslavement, you hence lose your freedom, because as ‘Dr. Love’- Sir Leo F. Buscaglia, once said, “only a person who risks (and loves) is (truly) free”.
Let’s not forget there are individuals who don’t necessarily feel the same, individuals who believe that “love is a foolish/solely pleasurable venture.” While all these emotions are valid, they’re not exactly practical. Personally, and respectfully, I would rather be a “fool” and get disappointed than give up on someone I care about and potentially not love at all.
By holding back your feelings, you’re not just preventing yourself from something very beautiful and meaningful, but also that someone who loves you, from loving you and feeling loved. You are depriving yourself the emotion that many artists and philosophers regard as the ‘magical potion of life.’
So yes, love is a risk. But to not love, is a greater risk of depriving yourself from the raw chance of closing your eyes and pulling their body close to you, replacing fear with faith. It is a risk of letting go this heavenly feeling, of choosing to not allow your fragile, imperfect hearts to build and grow this subliminal- love. So, if you are lucky enough to have someone so loving, so caring, and so understanding in your life, someone so precious who replaces your fear with faith, then allow them to pop this bubble of yours and offer you all that they have. Allow yourself to truly feel all the feels. Keep cherishing this magical potion of life.
You deserve it, they deserve it.
References:
Benson, K., 2017. The Risky Paradox of Love: The More You Give, The More You Feel. [online] HuffPost. Available at: <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-risky-paradox-of-love_b_14030720>
Buscaglia, L., 2022. Risks. [online] Goodreads.com. Available at: <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6531047-risks-to-laugh-is-to-risk-appearing-a-fool-to>.
Donnelly, M., 2017. Love Is Risk. [online] Thought Catalog. Available at: <https://thoughtcatalog.com/marisa-donnelly/2017/09/love-is-risk/>.
