Is it better to be in love and feel vulnerable or to be loved and feel safe?”
I believe that to love truly you have to make yourself vulnerable. To love is to put your trust in that person, and to truly trust them you must put your happiness, future and present, in their care. If you fully believe that he will not abuse or break your trust, you should just give it to him and allow yourself to love him. But I also think that the exchange of trust must be mutual. You both have to give each other your all, or one of you is going to feel shorted and will end up unhappy. I want my special someone to put their life in my care, because I won’t truly have her love unless she does.
Sure you feel vulnerable and it’s understandable, you love this guy and you don’t want anything to ruin it and you don’t want to lose him. I’m sure people are going to tell you that he should make you feel secure so that you didn’t have anxiety but that’s not always true either. We become vulnerable when we fall in love with someone because we realize we want this person if our lives and we feel like we want them for a lifetime. That’s pretty big if you ask me and of course I would be worried if I felt he may not feel the same way or be telling me all that I want to hear. You’ve answered most of your questions yourself in the details and this is good because you’ve already come to these realizations by yourself and it’s OK. Let me tell you a few things about life. I have shared your exactly feelings over 30 years ago. I controlled every crush or little relationship I had been in and let them go based on feelings that were not strong enough for that particular person. You may hurt a lit
You seem to be focusing on your feelings. That can mean like, infatuation, lust, or a number of other things, but that is not love. Love is a conscious commitment to care for someone over and above caring for yourself. There is an element of forgetting yourself involved in love. You close your post with “…and if he does leave me, it will destroy me.” First of all, no it won’t. Second, as long as you are concentrating on yourself in this relationship there is no way it can last. Reading your post, it seems you have based your relationships on mutual attraction, which is nice, but not permanent, and then you simply end them, indicating a lack of commitment even as a friend. Now you are afraid someone will do the same to you. Emotions are no way to run a relationship. They can go along for the ride, but they should be the passengers, not the driver! Suggestion — become best friends, not lovers. Marrying your best friend is the lovliest thing that can happen to a person. There is mutual
