I read somewhere recently that to love someone is one of the greatest risks one can take in one’s life. Loving someone is like having a piece of your heart outside your body, running around in the world, taking chances with all the things that happen in the world. To love is to risk pain, risk hurt, risk loss and with all that, the fear – a constant fearfulness and worrying for the safety of the loved one, fretting over everything that can happen and being scared.
How do we handle that fear?
The fear can bring up some really unhelpful ways of behaviour. Often, because we are fearful, we turn to control. We don’t like being helpless and scared. We want to try and do something, anything to not feel that powerless feeling, and in that rush to feel capable and competent in protecting ourselves and our loved ones, we often try to restrict, limit and hold back our loved ones. We tell them they cannot go to certain places, do certain things, be with certain people or otherwise expose themselves to what we feel are risky.
It can start off as gentle beseeching, almost prayerful requests, “You are sweet and trusting. You don’t know how that person can be and what they can be like. Can you just avoid them? Just don’t be their friend anymore. You have so many others. You don’t really need them.” Soon though, it can become much more insistent and even manipulative, “If you love me, you will do this.” At its worst, it can become directly abusive including forceful restriction, denying access to financial or other resources, and even physical violence – all in the name of love, but really in the service of fear.
To love is to live in fear, and if we don’t accept the fear as a real and inevitable cost of love, we will sooner or later fall prey to the unending cycle of trying to control, failing, and despairing enough to try to control more rigorously, until finally, we become the instrument of our fear ourselves, squeezing the love away from our loved one till there is no love left – only fear. We end up becoming something that we ourselves may not love, we see the object of our affection turning further away from ourselves. We find ourselves getting increasingly desperate and in that ever-tightening spiral, things getting worse all the time till a breaking point arrives.
If not control, what then?
Allowing space for fear to exist in love is a really hard thing to do. Yes, the world can be scary. Yes, our person can get hurt. Yes, our love for each other can get muddled up and confused. Yes, there is much to fear. Yet, we just need to allow for the fear to exist along with love, accepting it as one accepts the thorns that come with roses. The way out of the fear cycle is not through control but through trust and connection. The paradox of facing fear in love is to love more, not love less.
Mahesh Natarajan
(The author is a counsellor with InnerSight)