Ngl, I’m a hopeless romantic.
I think love is beautiful even though I spent the majority of my life questioning its very existence.
The two questions I usually circle back to is why do people love?
And what is the point of it?
I’ve asked these same questions to many of my friends who are single or have been in a committed relationship but none of their answers were able to satisfy the inner skeptic slash hopeless romantic in me.
I couldn’t understand or make sense of why it is that we choose to love and therein place ourselves in such a vulnerable and compromising position. When we love, we open up the best and worst parts of ourselves to our partners and hope that they would protect it as their own. We let them into our vulnerabilities and invite them into our future and the picture-perfect life we envisioned for ourselves. To place so much trust in one person is something so fundamentally beautiful yet so terrifying to me. The risks doesn’t seem justified and when you look at the statistics, the odds doesn’t seem that great either.
When we love, we open up the best and worst parts of ourselves to our partners and hope that they would protect it as their own.
It’s a pretty grim view for a hopeless romantic, I know. There’s a silver lining here and I don’t necessarily think I have this all figured out…but I think a part of it has to do with finding someone who makes you want a life besides yourself.
I’ve also come to realize that this is not something you can just hear and expect to internalize either, it’s a feeling you get from meeting someone who makes you realize for the first time that you really don’t want to take on this world alone (even though you’re perfectly capable of doing so).
I think when this kind of person comes around, they will make all the perceived risks you have guarding around yourself feels almost negligible.