Vulnerable: To be or not to be?

It’s a story we have heard a million and one times before. Girl meets boy, boy and girl fall in love, boy or girl aren’t the same people they thought they were at the beginning. Scars, scars, tears.

I just keep thinking about how scary that is, that the one person you love the most could end up causing you the deepest of wounds. It feels safer, wiser, to hold a part of yourself apart, to not allow them have access to all of you. At least that way, if anything happens, you can still feel you are shielded, protected in some way. So, it becomes a game of hide and seek, “don’t let them see, don’t let them know”, because you are afraid that if they did, they could hurt you.

I’m reminded about the advice I’ve heard people give over the years. They tell the man that it is better if the woman loves more and vice versa. It’s why we don’t reply texts immediately, we don’t want to seem too eager, let them not know, let them not see. These are legit lifelines people hold on to, everything geared at preventing hurt.

This goes beyond romantic relationships, in every human interaction, we are always trying to protect ourselves, hence the concept of self-preservation. And is it such a bad thing, to not want to get hurt, to put systems in place aimed at avoiding pain and heartbreak.

But what if hurt is inevitable. What if, yes, the one that’s supposedly meant to love you and choose you, falls short of those expectations some times. Isn’t that the frailty of the human condition, no one sets out to hurt who they love but seeing as we can never guarantee our ability to meet expectations all the time, hurt almost becomes inevitable.

I feel this is a hard truth and even as I write, I find myself struggling with the entire concept. What I do know however is that fear is a negative emotion and its aim is always to paralyse. There can be no true love without vulnerability. This is because, knowledge of a person is the foundation for love and if we are not truly known, we cannot be truly loved. We must thus allow ourselves to be vulnerable even with the risk of being hurt, being seen as silly or taken for granted.

Afterall, if the greatest lover of all could do it, what exactly is our excuse? Jesus Christ was literally God in a human body and this meant He knew everything that would happen. He knew that the people he healed would likely stand by as He was crucified, He knew that one of His own would betray Him and He knew that all would forsake Him at the end. Yet, He still chose to love. No wonder Cory Asbury called it reckless love because even till today, He still chooses to love us despite how unfaithful we can be. He knew.

I wish I could believe that people who love each other don’t hurt one another but we both know that isn’t true. Parents hurt their children, siblings hurt each other and so do spouses. We can’t allow fear of hurt to prevent us from loving, we only need to realise our frailty and show grace when we don’t live up to each other’s expectations. We have to trust God to write us a beautiful love story instead of focusing on all the things that could possibly go wrong.

Choosing to love someone and being vulnerable is taking a dive into deep waters and even when done with open eyes, it is still a dive. The what ifs of life are innumerable but letting them trap us in a cage of fear will be to our own detriment. Vulnerable, to be or not to be? You ultimately will need to make the choice soon.

Image credit: Nathan Anderson on Unsplash