Love and Trust

Falling in love can feel scary. Just now, I found myself wanting to soften my words – to insert “a little” or “a tad bit,” but I’m trying to hamper down on this tendency of mine to constantly qualify.

Anyways, where were we? Love. As spectacular as it is to be in love, there is this whole other dimension to it, not to mention lots of emotional gradients in between its extremes of euphoria and neuroses. The frightening part of love for some of us (echem echem, myself included), is that it positions another person to have a uniquely powerful sway over us. Trust is a core part of a healthy relationship, yes dear reader, I know, but trust falling my heart into another’s hands has been surprisingly difficult for me.

What I am now recognizing is that part of the trust you learn when you fall in love is not only trusting the other person– but perhaps as importantly, trusting yourself, too. After all, how can you surrender to the free-fall of love until you trust in yourself to overcome the heartbreaks that are inevitably packaged with love? And how can you halt self-sabotaging thoughts when you don’t recognize that they are rooted in fear?

Now that I am no longer operating from a place of fear, my qualms surrounding the future have dissipated, and slowly, I’ve allowed myself to be more vulnerable. Perhaps the best outcome of my inner trust is that it reminds me to actively appreciate my relationship in this moment, without worrying too much about what may lie ahead.

Reader, this is all not to say that you shouldn’t let yourself become emotionally attached to someone you deem worthy of carefully holding your heart in their hands. Rather, it’s to say – don’t be too scared to let yourself really depend on another person. As Anne Bronte once wrote, “He who dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.” And in the context of love, the thorn of heartache is almost always worth it. You may get bruised. In fact, you probably will get hurt. And that’s okay. Trust in your resilience.

Perhaps the truth is that loss is an inevitable part of love. Whether through relocation, separation, or death, the person you love – really all people you love, cannot be with you forever. With this reminder, I tell myself to love the people in my life absolutely, while always knowing that my days with them are finite, because as visitors (rather than residents) of this earth, we are finite, too.