To love someone is to open up your heart . . .
To love someone is to open up your heart and make yourself
vulnerable. In effect, you say to this
other person, “Being close to you is so incredibly important to me that I will
give you the power to hurt me, because I trust that you will not abuse that
power.”
Tragically, though, sometimes even the people we love—the
very ones with whom we have been so vulnerable—end up hurting us. It is at this point that we have a choice to
make. We can either keep loving, keep
opening up our heart—or we can withdraw, vowing never to let anyone get that
close to us again.
Sigmund Freud theorized that people make choices based on
what he called the “pleasure principle.”
That is, we seek out the things that bring us pleasure and do everything
possible to avoid the things that cause us pain. However, on a deeper level, I think the
fundamental choice we make is whether we will be open enough to allow both
pleasure and pain to enter our lives, or whether we will opt for a life in
which we are insulated from ever being hurt.
Admittedly, the idea of never being hurt, or experiencing
pain, may strike us as attractive. But
it comes at a steep cost. If you truly
wish never to be hurt, then you must never make yourself vulnerable. If you never make yourself vulnerable, then
it follows that you will never fully open up your heart to another person. And if you never open up your heart, then you
will never experience what it is to love or to be loved!
C.S. Lewis put it like this: “Love anything, and your heart
will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart
to no one, not even to 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, and irredeemable.”
Speaking personally, I would much rather run the risk of
having my heart broken—even shattered—than seal it off from the joyful
experience of being loved!
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