The Great Underrated Truth of Love: It’s Scary.

Intimacy brings vulnerability, vulnerability is scary, thus intimacy is scary.

Reviewed by Kaja Perina

Key points

• The fears and wounds awakened under intimacy’s warming effect require courage to face.
• The word smitten comes from the word smite, meaning to strike a blow. Love is something by which we're struck.
• In the calculus of the heart, opening to love is big not small, and requires that we lower our drawbridges.

Some of the world’s classic love stories—Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Scarlett and Rhett, Tarzan and Jane—are built on the idea that what powers love is hurdles: the differences and distances between two people, the disapproval of their families, the fact that her dream-house is a Tudor in the country and his is a tree in the jungle.

These stories also highlight that the strength of love is commensurate with how mightily our heroes and heroines struggle against the obstacles fate throws in their path.

In our modern re-enactments of these love stories, the obstacles may be quite prosaic—she wants to socialize, he wants to veg out in front of the TV; he wants to spend their money on travel, she wants to put it in the bank; she doesn’t like her mother-in-law, he doesn’t like his. But there’s a reason passion comes from a word meaning to suffer, and nowhere is the canonical connection between passion and suffering truer than in our love lives, where we not only suffer love’s manias and losses, and our endless hunger for it, but the kinds of surrender and vulnerability—the letting down of our guard—required to both evoke it and sustain it. Love isn’t an ordinary human achievement. It’s an extraordinary human achievement.

At some level we all know this: relationships are hard, not easy, and intimacy is unnerving. It’s a straightforward equation: intimacy is rife with vulnerability, vulnerability is scary, therefore intimacy is scary.

There’s a reason we refer to making love. It takes work to navigate hurdles and vulnerabilities. “Day labor,” the poet Rainer Rilke called it. “God knows there is no other word for it.” But these day labors are where the hard work of real loving begins. Real because it’s an act of will, whereas falling in love is not. All you have to do there is fall. But in order to love, you have to climb.

In the calculus of the heart, though, opening to love is big not small, and lowering our drawbridges gives others the power to mess us up. Vulnerability, after all, is simply the capacity to be wounded.

Ultimately, it’s probably true that nobody is capable of messing you up without your permission, but by opening yourself to intimacy to begin with, you’re putting your heart in someone else’s hands and you don’t know where those hands have been. As Diane Ackerman writes in A Natural History of Love, “You’re equipping someone with freshly sharpened knives, stripping naked, then inviting him or her to stand close. What could be scarier?”

It’s no coincidence that the word smitten comes from the word smite, which means to strike a blow. Love is something by which we're struck. The god of love, after all, doesn’t use love-potions or magic spells to work his will. He uses arrows.

The truth is, we all come to the table with stories of how we’ve been smited by love, how we’ve been love-struck. We all have our resumes of rejected love: wounded prides and clobbered egos, shattered illusions, fears of loss, unfulfilled fantasies: I thought you were Prince/ss Charming but you’re not. I thought you could read my mind and anticipate all my needs, but you couldn’t. I thought you’d cure my life but you didn’t. I thought you’d be the missing link but you weren’t.

I recently ran across a cartoon showing a dog lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. “He pretended to throw the ball,” the dog said, “but he faked me out and I made a fool of myself. It was the most humiliating experience of my life. And that’s when I started chewing slippers.”

As for romance, we don’t just hop into bed with our partners. We bring to our erotic lives the full spectrum of our feelings and experiences around being or not being nurtured, the entire history of our relationship to relationship. How trusting are you of other people? How worthy do you feel of receiving love? How well defended are your boundaries? How do you feel about letting go of control? Do you like to be touched? How naked are you willing to be with another person? How do you feel about your body? How much insecurity can you tolerate? How much pleasure? How much anger do you have around love? Around power? Around sex? What are you willing to do to be close to somebody? How much compassion can you muster for yourself? And how much for your partner’s vulnerabilities, for his or her struggle to open to love?

When intimacy and the desire for relatedness ask us to look closely at these questions, we’re being called to work at love. As the mythologist Joseph Campbell, popularizer of “the hero’s journey,” once said, “Marriage is an ordeal. It means yielding time and again. It means sacrificing the ego.” Again, not everyone’s cup of tea. But true. I had a college professor tell me once that the basis of every story ever written or told could be summed up in one phrase: “Two worlds collide.” Ask Romeo. Ask Tarzan.

The storms unleashed by intimacy—the wounds and rages that get roused from slumber under its warming effects, the dramas we unconsciously come together to reenact—can readily betray the age-old fantasy that love comes naturally, conquers all, and is forever, a miraculously self-regenerating flower, not something that takes work, as if it were some interminable construction project. But it is.

Despite our reticence to do a trust-fall into the arms of intimacy, we all have within us the hunger to connect, the desire for union, and the capacity for relatedness. And though the heat of the relational kitchen may drive a lot of people from it, the hottest part of a flame is right in the middle. And it’s here that we encounter the hard work—and the opportunity—of loving another person. And of course loving ourselves when we fail to live up to our own standards.

It’s here that we must offer regular and humble bows to the chaos of love, the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket pants-down-at-your-ankles vulnerability of it, and set a place at the table for its confusions and disappointments.

This is surely one from the easier-said-than-done department, but what we stand to gain from all our day labors, and our willingness to lower the drawbridge, is an actual living breathing boots-on-the-ground experience of being in love, rather than outside looking in.