If You're Going to Bother with Love, Here's What You Need to Know:

Love will break you open.

No matter what.

Even if things work out, and the one you're with becomes your forever person.

It's still going to hurt.

Because love is both surrendering to your needs and desires, and fighting for them at the same time. It is both surrendering to another person, and fighting for them all at once.

If that sounds complicated, well you're right. It is.

Because you don't get to the place where unconditional "forever love" can live until your walls are beaten down and your heart is broken open.

Love requires vulnerability. It requires laying down the weapons and walls that protect you long enough to allow someone to come close enough that they can truly hurt you.

Keeping someone at arms distance might keep you safe, but it won't let someone in enough to love and be loved.

So the moment you start to catch feelings, you're done for.

Even if you manage to care a little less or move on a little faster than the other.

Even if you swore it wasn't love, just a warm bed and someone to talk to late at night. Because odds are your feelings slipped under the covers when you were too busy kissing to notice.

The truth is that love is basically a disaster waiting to happen.

You might as well load up your freezer with Ben and Jerry's the moment your heart takes a pause for a second too long, looking into the eyes of another as you pull back from a kiss that you felt all the way to your bones.

If you're going to bother with love, you have to face the fact that even if you claim you've never felt it, it might simply be that you've never known love well enough to call it what it was.

Because love is not just romance and grand gestures. Love is also the moments of quiet joy, selfless care, and friendship that go unnoticed. Love is not just butterflies. It's also hurting, knowing that the one beside you is hurting too.

No matter how many ways you try to protect yourself from love, it will find you. And if you entertain it for even a moment, it will break you, and it will change you.

So if you're going to bother with love you might as well give it everything you have.

You might as well lean into the uncertainty, and leap with faith into the challenges it will bring. You might as well welcome the emotions that sometimes feel more like a rollercoaster off its tracks.

You might as well put your hands up and surrender because no matter what, trying to cling on to your guardrail won't stop you from hitting the pavement when you fall.