Why Are We So Afraid of Love?
on the beauty of fear, the privilege of falling and why perfection is the enemy of love
I’ve been thinking about love a lot again— did I ever really stop?
Two nights ago I stood in my two degree bathroom, shivering in my thin green towel, breath collecting like clouds in the candlelight. With one foot perched on the edge of the bath-tub I rubbed moisturiser into my legs, the repetitive circular motions almost hypnotic. As I lathered myself up in sweet smelling lotions, my mind wandered to recent conversations about love— more specifically the initial phases, and our anxiety surrounding it.
If you have ever been lucky enough to experience loving someone, you will be familiar with the occasional wave of fear that grips your heart— it often comes quietly and seemingly from nowhere, when the warm rush of adoration for a moment gains an edginess of anxiety. But where does this anxiety come from?
I believe it comes from our human desire to predict the future, to seek perfection, and plan for the worst— and what is one of the outcomes of love if not to lose it, or at the very least have it tarnished by pain. Even the semantics of how we speak about the processes of love foreshadow a lack of control, uncertainty and pain, we “fall” in love, are “dangerously in love,” and “head over heels.” I can think of countless texts from friends with the classic post date one-liner, “I’m in trouble,” which we all know really means, “it went so well, this could be it.”
So what happens when we fall in love that causes us to swing wildly between butterflies and trepidation?
A few things:
Our bodies are flooded with a cocktail of hormones like dopamine and adrenaline that encourage us to pursue our mate, oxytocin soothes us into attachment and promotes a sense of safety, and cortisol that gives us an edge and promotes that stressful feeling of ‘wondering’ what the other person is doing or thinking.
We let our guard down— whether its the oxytocin signalling that we are safe to relax, or whether its the traits of our partner that make us feel seen enough to do so. In order to truly connect with someone we must be willing to be vulnerable, we share more than we do with most other humans.
We merge lives and integrate; for some this happens quickly, for others it is a slow drip feed over time, but eventually our lives and their inner working overlap. In part, we gain another heartbeat that lives closely beside our own.
These are all pretty phenomenal experiences and the way that we romanticise them, find deeper meaning and immerse ourselves in them is so innately human. No other species on the planet obsesses over how the object of their affection smiles, tucks their hair behind their ear or drinks their coffee enough to write poems and songs, to create art. We are the only species that chooses to be together even if procreation is not on the cards— we stay simply because love is enough. Humans love love and crave connection, yet many are still afraid of it.
Often when the highs are high the lows are even lower, and I believe that is what we fear the most. We fear the moment things don’t work out, because we know if it felt that good, it will likely hurt even more.
When we choose to let someone in, we allow parts of ourselves to be seen that many may have never even scratched the surface of. Sure, friends and family may come close, but in adulthood it becomes easier to hold people at arms length and to hide the parts of ourselves we would prefer to stay in the dark. But thats the catch-22 of romantic love and partnerships— it only works when you let each other within close proximity, otherwise, it is nothing but a semi-quasi friendship with sex attached. The people we try so hard in the beginning to be our most perfect selves for, that we try so hard to impress, inevitably become the people that see the ugly parts of us, the imperfections and every day ‘blah’-ness. When we choose someone, eventually they will see our unmade up face in the morning, our bed hair, bad skin and threadbare pyjamas. They will see us crumble over the little things and grieve the big things. They will bear witness to our piles of washing, temper tantrums and our unmade beds. They will learn our weaknesses and locate our wounds, they experience our weird eating patterns and how we choose to spend our alone time. And if we are lucky enough, they will choose us and all of our shit. And for this, they will grow as close to us as another human can get.
The fear in this is two-fold. For some it is the fear of the closeness itself— they fear being perceived as less than perfect, they fear being know and seen. They fear the supposed pressure tied to that. Whereas for others, it is the fear that the most human parts will be thrown back in their face, or worse, that the person who saw these flaws and loved them anyway will leave them.
I’m sure we all have a memory of the first time we let a partner truly see us. I can think of many, like the time I was in the depths of anorexia, so frail and sick I was unsightly, so afraid of the world I was borderline unbearable. Yet my boyfriend, those many years ago now, chose to stay. He picked up the broken pieces, said lets put this back together and kept on loving me. I think of the time I sobbed over the phone, barely able to string a coherent sentence together and confessed to my partner that I was afraid I would be unloveable if my body changed due to injuries. It’s every time I cry now because I am frustrated. For many of us its in the moments our perfect mask slips and the facade cracks and peaking out from underneath is a human, simply trying their best in all their imperfection... And we are proven time and time again that with the right person, nothing will scare them off— certainly not a pimple or a fear of carbohydrates, an addiction to shitty tv or a tough conversation. So often we are shown that they will stay— yet still we are scared.
And this, is perhaps where the real fear comes in— we have found the person who loves us anyway… so what if one day, we lose them?
So what do we do to avoid this? We protect ourselves by avoiding intimacy, we keep people at arms length, we keep them away from our friends or our family, have our safe meeting places and dates, we set up rules and agendas to follow and box them in safely. We shut off people who just want to love us in order to protect ourselves from the potential of pain— we stop it from ever getting to that point.
We are so scared of pain that we don’t allow ourselves to experience the full gamut of love.
There is a saying that has been paraphrased and tweaked so many times I am not even sure who said it first or where, but it goes something like this, “to grieve deeply is to have loved fully.” And this, this is my whole point.
How lucky are we to even have this fear— to fear loss means we have something worth losing in the first place, it means we care. In a past life as a music teacher I remember telling my students who were nervous to go on stage that their nerves were a good sign, because it meant they cared. Our nerves reflect our excitement and our dedication to seeing something through to the end or to a point of success— I believe that the art of loving and our relationships are no different.
And on the fear of being seen in our mess and our raw humanness, how lucky are we to meet someone that wants to see these parts of us— that cares enough to unravel our complexities like a spool of thread, and to sew us back together with the same care when those same complexities cause us to fall apart. How lucky are we that we can meet someone that sees all our imperfections and loves us anyway— perhaps all the more for them.
How lucky are we to experience the dizzying rush of falling in love, first kisses, first sleepovers and the nerves of meeting the family. In a relationship our intimate and emotional literacy expands and our burdens are shared. We find not only a lover but another best-friend, someone to traverse life alongside— no longer do we need to face it all alone. The joys are shared and doubled, and the hardships are halved.
So many will wander their life and despite their wanting, may never find someone to connect with on this level— some wait years, some wait lifetimes, whilst others get to experience this depth more than once in their life. We view love and its tendency for messiness and unpredictability as bad thing, we see it as something we need to perfect, optimise and figure out. But what if it’s really all about just letting it happen, what if it’s not supposed to be perfect and we are simply supposed to let ourselves experience and evolve together? What if loving isn’t always supposed to be pretty, what if love itself is enough, exactly as it is. When we expect perfection we so often scare ourselves out of even trying in the first place— we rob ourselves of what could be an experience of a lifetime because of a fleeting moment of doubt.
So sure, we can hold ourselves back from relationships and partners because we are scared they won’t like what they see when we really let them in, or that it won’t be perfect. We can play the role of partner at only 50% because we fear the uncertainty of the future, and it’s better to protect ourselves from the potential of “failure”.
Or, we can allow ourselves to love fully, to dive in headfirst and choose love— to see what doors unlock for us when we just let ourselves feel. To see what happens when we stop trying to perfect every single thing in our lives and just let ourselves enjoy being human, to fuck-up, to fall and to laugh together— to try again.
To choose each other day after day.
We are so good at going all in with our careers, our finances, our diets and gym programmes, we are so good at investing in ourselves because we know that when we just try a little bit harder the juice will be worth the squeeze— so why should love be any different? When we choose to open up, to trust and to let ourselves love and be loved, the experience is that much sweeter.
I fear our proclivity for comfort, perfection and our own ‘peace’ has left us lazy, unable and unwilling to take risks in a way that will shape us as humans— to put in the effort to something that we know will pay dividends.
So I ask you: why are you afraid of love?
My challenge to you? Find it (the fear), then go and find someone who flips your whole belief system on its head— go do it anyway. Let yourself be surprised by love— I promise you its worth it.
I choose to trust that love will win— and that even when it is not perfect, we are a richer for it anyway.
Thank you for reading.
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