What's Love Got to Do With It?
Say you’re a happy little introvert, spending most of your time alone. Sometimes you might feel a little isolated and wonder whether the nice, safe life you’ve built is worth enduring the occasional bout of loneliness, or whether you should reach out and try to bring a loving relationship into your life.
Self-styled “normal” humans have probably accosted you with threatening phrases like “open up to love” as encouragement to change. But if it were that simple, no one would choose loneliness over love, would they? I’m here to tell you the truth.
When you leave the safety of your home, the first thing you find out is that-no matter how open you are to it-love is not guaranteed. Love is capricious, unpredictable, and unforeseeable. Whether you have success or not is largely out of your control. So at best, what all those well-intended friends are actually telling you is to open up to the mere *possibility* of love.
And because love is so rare and fickle, it’s pretty likely that you’ll waste your time and energy (and emotional vulnerability) and still come up empty-handed at the end of the day.
So realistically, what you’re actually being asked to open up to is the likelihood of rejection and heartbreak. And if you’re like most men, you’ll experience a whole lot of rejection and heartbreak before you ever find someone who will love you.
And trust me: experiencing a little loneliness once in a while is a walk in the park when compared to the pain of a broken heart.
So when your friends push you to “choose love”, remind them that it’s not a choice between loneliness and love, but between loneliness and the likelihood of repeated rejections and heartbreak, which are vastly more painful. Maybe then they’ll understand that avoiding romantic entanglements might seem like a sensible course of action to some of us.
And when they talk about dating being a growth experience, you should remind them that a growth is something painful that has to be surgically removed and excised before it kills you!