What we risk for love
I was dating someone recently, and for the first time in a long time, I started to fall for someone again. It feels silly to say that now that it’s over. Silly to have ever liked someone enough to allow myself to feel safe enough to begin to fall, knowing that at some point he might not be there to catch me, which is exactly what happened.
But then it got me thinking about everything we risk when the possibility of something profound is on the horizon.
What we risk for love.
Firstly, finding a mutual connection that has the potential to ever be something is rare. Being equally obsessed with each other. Feeling that spark when your hands brush against one another. The butterflies when you look into their sea blue eyes, lost in a trance while you’re sat in a bar surrounded by strangers, but you swear it feels like it’s just you two. There is something so intoxicating about being wanted by someone you want just as much.
To feel like the feeling isn’t one-sided. To not have to question whether they enjoyed the date as much as you did, because you can see it in the way they look at you. To feel their excitement when your name appears on their phone. To know that when you go home and replay the evening in your head, there is a good chance they are doing exactly the same.
And that is where the risk begins. Because the moment something starts to feel real, you have something to lose.
You start telling them things you don’t usually tell people. The strange little things you do when you’re alone. You let someone become familiar with you. And familiarity is intimate.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest things we risk for the potential of love. Not just our hearts, but our privacy. Our independence. The carefully constructed version of ourselves that we try so hard to protect. Because to really let someone in means allowing them to know you well enough to hurt you.
And that fear of being hurt starts the moment you realise you care. The moment their actions begin to matter, because one misstep, one slip-up, can hurt you. That’s when you know that they’ve become more than just a person you’re dating; they’ve become a possibility, and possibilities are dangerous because they are so easy to fall in love with. You don’t just fall for the person in front of you. You fall for everything they could become in your life.
The Sunday mornings.
The holidays.
The dinners.
The inside jokes that haven’t happened yet.
The friends you’ve told them about and are so excited to introduce.
The places you haven’t gone.
You start building memories before you’ve even made them.
We meet someone new and, despite every lesson we’ve learned, despite every person who came before them, we allow ourselves to wonder if this could be different. We tell ourselves we’re going to take it slowly this time. We’re not going to get attached too quickly. We’re going to protect our hearts. We’re going to watch their actions. We’re going to stay grounded.
And then they look at us a certain way, and suddenly all of those rules become much harder to follow.
Because being vulnerable with someone is one of the most intimate things you can be. To open yourself up, to share the thoughts you usually keep to yourself, to let someone see the parts of you that you don’t show everyone, and to trust that all of it is safe with them. There is a quiet kind of surrender in that. You’re trusting someone with the parts of you that could hurt the most if they were ever mishandled.
We risk rejection. We risk embarrassment. We risk looking foolish. We risk being the one who cared more. We risk being vulnerable with someone who might not know what to do with our vulnerability. We risk making someone important who may never make us important in the same way. We risk being disappointed.
And perhaps the biggest risk of all is that we risk changing ourselves.
Because when something ends badly enough, it can alter the way you approach everything that comes after it. You become more guarded. You question more. You hold back the thing you really want to say because you remember what happened the last time you said it. You stop allowing yourself to get excited because excitement now feels like the beginning of disappointment. You become suspicious of good things because you’ve learned they can disappear.
But despite everything falling for someone asks us to risk, we still want it.
We still want to meet someone and feel that feeling. We still want the butterflies. We still want the sea blue eyes staring at you from across a crowded bar. We still want someone to reach for our hand. We still want someone to know the small details about us. We still want someone to remember the story we told them once and bring it up six months later. We still want someone who notices when we’re quiet. Someone who knows when something is wrong before we’ve said it. Someone who can make an ordinary Tuesday feel like something worth remembering.
And maybe that’s because, underneath all of the fear, we know that the risk of love could be the greatest reward.