Vulnerability

Love: beautiful, powerful, and potentially harmful; a delicious pain.  I’ve never really considered myself to be a very brave person.  I like to avoid all unnecessary risks as much as I can, but one particular risk that I took without hesitation was one of the bravest and most potentially harmful of all: falling in love, placing my very heart and soul into my lover’s hands.  Looking in retrospect, falling in love takes a huge amount of bravery, for being in love is the epitome of vulnerability.

At any moment my lover could be taken from me.  Maybe he would find a new lover, simply move on, or – heaven forbid – die.  The powerful force of love is extremely powerful but with this power also comes major vulnerability, for if the chain of love is broken, I would be broken, completely shattered into a million pieces.  Love binds my soul to my lover so that if my lover leaves me, a part of my very soul would leave along with him.  You can’t get any more vulnerable than that, putting your heart and soul out on the line, willingly giving everything you are to someone, unknowing and/or unheeding of the extreme vulnerability that this entails.

Like I said, I never thought of myself as being a brave person, but I’ve recently realized that I actually am.  For even though I now comprehend how vulnerable my love makes me, I continue to love passionately and fearlessly.  The risk of love is well-worth the potential harm it could create.  I think that maybe the vulnerability that love creates is actually something deeply beautiful and shameless.  Letting someone see you, both inside and out, no editing or hiding of anything about yourself in any way-- no bragging of yourself and also no apologizing for who you are—just exhibiting you and only you: this so rarely happens, only with someone you deeply trust.

To share your soul with another person is a major risk.  Your soul consists of not only the good but also the bad.  What if your lover doesn’t like the “bad” parts of yourself, your imperfections?  What if some aspects of your soul make him want to run away?

…But then the miracle, the wondrous quality of love, comes in: your lover loves everything about your soul, even your imperfections.  To him, your imperfections are what make you so beautiful, the uniqueness that makes him love you so much.  Your perfect imperfections.  I don’t know about you, but being loved for everything that I am—body, mind, and soul—is definitely worth the vulnerability that it involves.  Love is such an absolutely awe-inspiring emotion.  So powerful and everlasting, there’s nothing else quite like it in the world.   As Christian says in the movie Moulin Rouge: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.”