Both loving and being loved can be scary. 

Saying I love you can take a lot of courage. These three words, “I love you”, can make us vulnerable to a very intimate type of rejection. We’re putting ourselves our there, “What if I say I love you, and the person I love, doesn’t love me back?”

And if my love does love me back? Love can bring joy and happiness, but it can also make us vulnerable to pain, hurt, deceit, betrayal, humiliation and abandonment. Many of us have experience love with the wrong person at some point in our life. And if you haven’t, it’s possible you will. It can change us. And it can change (hopefully only for a short while) our capacity to love ourselves, others, and to love again fully.

What if our love responds with, “I love you too”? The relationship changes. Both people have acknowledged something very profound and unique in the experience of being human, and this too has an affect on us. Often, this response can bring up new feelings, thoughts, and questions. Let’s go though 5 examples of things that may come up after a first I love you.

1. What do they mean when they say I love you? For some, I love you comes naturally and easy. They say I love you to friends, family, and to just about anyone they have a casual relationship with. For others, saying I love you is challenging, or may feel impossible. Their experiences with love may be tangled with trauma, and their body remembers those traumatic experiences and associates them with love. They can’t love nor express their love fully without first facing and working through these traumas. And in many cases, this can be terrifying.

2. Are they being honest? Doubt can be a normal reaction to hearing a person say, “I love you”. This can be a signal that something is wrong in the relationship. Maybe we’re sensing something is off with our partner, or with the relationship? And if our partner is being honest, this feeling can point to the reality that we have work to do around healing our own traumas. This can show up in our sense of being worthy of love, or our partner, fears of abandonment, or issues around trust.

3. Am I ready for a loving relationship? This happens when we thought we were ready for love, but now we’re doubting that. Here are some of the thoughts and questions that might come up around this:

I was happy, but this is becoming so serious, so fast, maybe I should back off? I wanted a committed relationship, but now I’m feeling trapped.

Where will we go next? Am I ready for that? Do I want to shut the door on the possibility of other relationships… forever? What if I get bored? Or what if something better comes along? Do I want to miss that?

What if things don’t work out? What if I hurt this person? Or, what if they hurt me? What am I going to do? How am I going to protect myself?

As you can see, love can be complicated. A lot of these questions are normal, but they lead to walls that block love from our life. And we’ve only examined half the equation. Let’s look at being on the other side of “I love you”.

4. Do I need to respond? When someone say I love you, most of us feel an expectation to respond. Maybe the response is, “I love you too”, but not always. But if we don’t love the person, what do we do? How are we suppose to respond? 

5. What if we’re not sure how we feel? If could be, we don’t have those feelings for this person, or we don’t have those feelings — yet. We might think, “I feel like I’m getting there, but what if I don’t get there?”. Now there’s a new pressure to get to love, and to get there quickly — whether we’re ready or not. In this case, the evolving love is no longer organic. This can be a tough place to be, especially if you’re not sure you’ll ever get there. Do I say, “I love you”, to keep them around while I figure this out? Is this what they’re doing this to me? Is this love or anxiety? Is this really just an anxious attachment?

With all of this said, love is one of the most amazing emotions a human can experience. Some of the world’s greatest stories, books, poetry, art (and social media pages and websites) are based upon it. And if you ask any person, “Would you want to live a life without love?” People consistently say “No.” People want to love and be loved. If given a choice, human’s choose a life full of love.

This leads us to today’s love question: 

#love #fear #relationships #boyfriend #girlfriend #marriage #coupling

If you feel comfortable, please share your answer, and then write something encouraging and thoughtful in response to someone else’s post. Also, please consider sharing, or asking the question to one of your fellow living creatures, so the conversations can continue.