About the Feeling

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.” — Neil Gaiman

Those lines may seem odd for some people, but for me it is exactly true. As a person who tends to highly rely on logic, talking about feeling is awkwardly messy, particularly love. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel anything. I do intensely and deeply feel love creeping up inside my heart.

But the thing is that I don’t know how to deal with it. Because of my inability to manage the feeling, as analytical person, I treat love as any other object to be analyzed which is not supposed to be applicable. The result is sadly the more I probe, the less I understand about it, the further I am from my common sense.

I obviously notice that we can’t choose whom we are attracted to. But as the book of Four Loves wrote, “the event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable, the idea that it should be transitory.” For a person like me who has great sense of self-awareness, a slight shift of emotional state can easily make me feel overwhelmed. Thus, to find the most plausible explanation, I used to constantly seek for the clarity.

Several times I’ve asked my friends, “how did you decide that you would love her/him?”

Once one of them said, “you know, love is natural feeling that people can have. So, it’s okay to fall in love with somebody and completely love that person. But you have to bear in mind that love comes with two consequences. First is you’ll be happy with it. Second is you might get hurt by it. There is no safe investment, but you know the risk.”

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.” — C.S. Lewis

Noting that love is conscious decision, I’ve come to an understanding that love is a verb that you deliberately choose to. To love is to be honest. To love is to be willing to understand. To love is to be willing to accept them as who they are. To love is to be willing to let them be the best version of they are. To love is to be willing to share. To love is to be willing to trust. To love is to be willing to support for their dreams are. To love is to be willing to compromise. To love is to be willing to work things out.

All in all, “to love at all is to be vulnerable.” —C.S. Lewis

PS: it’s just like drinking a cup of your favorite tea. Even though it may lightly harm your tongue, it certainly tastes better drinking tea with hot water than still water. All you need is courage, dear heart.