On falling too easily and loving too hard.

Since getting into a new relationship, I have found myself having an almost absurd number of conversations about love, and not just the practical conversations that come with being with someone new, but the much stranger ones that seem to happen when you start looking at your own life from slightly outside of it, trying to understand what it is that is actually happening to you. What does it mean to be in love? How do you know when something is love rather than infatuation, or projection, or simply the enormous relief of finding someone who makes you feel wanted? How much of love is choice and how much of it is something that happens to you, something you are almost helpless to stop once it has begun? And, perhaps most interestingly, what does it mean about a person if they seem to fall in love easily?

After a fairly candid conversation about romantic history recently, someone asked me: “Do you think you fall in love too easily?”

I have been thinking about that question ever since, partly because I don't really know what “too easily” is supposed to mean. Too easily compared to whom? Too easily according to what measure or timetable? Is there a correct amount of emotional resistance a person is supposed to demonstrate before their feelings become respectable? I understand the suspicion behind the question. There is a certain wisdom in being careful with your heart. We all know that intensity can disguise itself as intimacy, that chemistry can make us believe we know someone long before we actually do, that loneliness is capable of taking an ordinary encounter and dressing it up in the clothes of destiny. Many people are not falling in love at all, but falling in love with the possibility of being loved, and I think it would be dishonest to pretend I have never been one of them at any point in time.

However, I also think we too readily confuse caution with wisdom. There is a particular kind of emotional self-protection that is so culturally acceptable that we rarely question it. We admire the person who takes a long time to let anyone in, who is slow to text back, slow to say “I miss you,” slow to admit that they are excited, slow to use the word love. We call them discerning, say they have boundaries, and that they know their worth. Sometimes, of course, they do. Sometimes moving slowly is exactly what allows you to see someone clearly, without the distortion of wanting them to be something they are not. Sometimes you need time to find out how someone behaves when they are disappointed, how they speak to people who cannot give them anything, how they treat you when the novelty has worn off and there is no longer anything to prove.

I don't think there is anything inherently noble about falling quickly, and I certaintly don't think there is anything inherently cowardly about falling slowly. In fact, I think there is something important in being able to distinguish between wanting someone and knowing them, between being captivated by someone and being able to build a life beside them. Love without discernment can become a kind of self-deception, and there is nothing particularly romantic about repeatedly giving your heart to people who cannot hold it. But lately I have also started to wonder whether the opposite mistake is just as sad: becoming so preoccupied with protecting yourself from the wrong kind of love that you lose your capacity for the right kind altogether. It's a slightly tragic way of thinking that stems from the culturally embedded idea that the person who cares less has the upper hand. We are taught to ration ourselves, to wait before replying, to pretend we are less excited than we are, and to keep some small part of ourselves held back, just in case. We call it "playing it cool", but I think it is simply fear dressed up in fancy clothing. The reality is that many people are terrified of being the person who loved more, as though love were a competition and whoever feels the least has somehow won.

Well, frankly, I don't want to win at love, I want to experience it, and I think those are two very different ambitions. This is perhaps what my friend was trying to articulate to me last night when we were talking about all of this. She said that there's something courageous about the way I seem to be able to fall in love readily and deeply, because underneath it there appears to be a kind of confidence that even if it all went horribly wrong, even if I ended up heartbroken, even if the person I loved eventually stopped loving me, I would still be okay.

I don't think she meant okay in the careless sense of the word, not "okay" as in unaffected or "okay" as in I would simply shrug my shoulders and carry on. I think she meant that somewhere inside me there is a belief that heartbreak, however painful, would not be the end of me and underlying that belief, a sense of self-worth that means I am always open to opening myself up to people because I like who I am, and people can either take it or leave it, and indeed I can take or leave them. That distinction is important in explaining something about the way I love that I have never really understood before and indeed helps to answer the question "do you think you fall in love too easily".

Crucially, I am not fearless in love. In fact, I think I am actually quite afraid of it. I know what it means to give someone the ability to hurt you and I know that when you love someone properly, you create all these tiny points of vulnerability without even noticing you are doing it. You tell them the stories you don't tell other people, you let them know which things frighten you, which things make you feel small, what you need when you are sad. You give them access to the most ordinary parts of your life until they become woven through it so thoroughly that you can no longer quite tell where the relationship ends and your own routine begins. Their name becomes the person you instinctively want to tell things to. Then, suddenly, the possibility of losing them isn't an abstract possibility anymore, but instead becomes the possibility of losing a hundred tiny things that have become part of your world. That is frightening.

So I don't think I fall in love easily because I don't understand the consequences, I think perhaps I fall in love readily because I understand those consequences and have decided they are still worth risking for the joy of getting to know someone deeply, caring for them profoundly, and laughing with them shamelessly. Surely that is worth the risk? I think we spend so much of our lives trying to minimise the possibility of pain, without considering the beauty of maximising pleasure and we often forget that pain can simply be the price of having cared about something enough for its loss to matter.

I don't want to build a life around avoiding anything that could hurt me - that would be a very small way of living and I refuse to live in that way. Indeed, there are so many things we do knowing they will end: We go on holidays knowing we will come home, we watch sunsets knowing they disappear and make friends knowing that people move away, lives change and circumstances might separate us. We don't consider the ending proof that the experience was a mistake yet somehow, with romantic love, we have decided that impermanence makes the whole thing suspect.

There is no version of love in which you get to keep all the reward and eliminate all the risk, and once I accepted that, I started to think differently about what courage in love actually looks like. I used to think courage was being brave enough to survive heartbreak but now I think perhaps it is trusting yourself enough to know that you could. That's a subtle but enormous difference. If I believed that heartbreak would destroy me, then I would do one of two things: avoid love altogther or stay in a relationship that wasn't right for me simply to avoid the devastation of not having that relationship. But what if I trust myself? What if I know that I could be devastated and still recover? That I could spend weeks or months grieving something and eventually laugh again? That I could miss someone terribly and still build a life that belonged to me? That I could have my heart broken without becoming a person who no longer believes in love?

Then perhaps I don't need to make love smaller in order to feel safe inside it, perhaps I can let it be enormous. This means I want to be loved enormously and well: I want something mutual, kind, reciprocal, passionate, brimming with laughter, with good meals, with joy and good sex. Sure it's a tall order but I had to have my heart broken to know I wanted all of those things. Unlike in past relationships where I'd often compensate or make myself smaller for the sake of the other person, I have decided now that I want to be chosen with the same enthusiasm with which I choose and I want someone who is capable of holding the weight of what I give them. I want a love that is not just intense but safe, not just passionate but generous and I want to know that I am not the only one standing at the edge of the cliff.

There is something so beautiful to me about the fact that we can never actually know what another person will do with our heart, and still, sometimes, we hand it to them. Not because we are stupid, but because we are alive, and perhaps this is why the question of whether I fall in love too easily feels slightly wrong to me now. I don't think the interesting thing is how quickly I fall. I think the interesting thing is that I am still willing to fall at all.

Every time you love after having been hurt, you are doing something slightly miraculous. You are taking evidence from the past, the fact that people leave, that feelings change, that things can end, and refusing to let it dictate the future completely. You are saying, yes, I know what happened last time, and I am still capable of believing that something beautiful might happen this time. That is not naivety. In fact it might actually be one of the most sophisticated forms of hope. And that is the kind of person I want to remain - a hopeful one; someone who is discerning, but not cynical, someone who can recognise the difference between fantasy and reality without becoming afraid of fantasy, someone who can love deeply without abandoning herself inside another person and crucially, someone who understands that a relationship is not a guarantee of permanence but an agreement to be present for as long as the two people can honestly keep choosing each other.

So, do I fall in love too easily? Maybe, but I am beginning to think the better question is: what would it cost me if I stopped? What would I become if I spent my life making sure that nobody ever had enough of my heart to break it? I suspect I would become very safe, and very dull and I wish to be neither of those things. No, I think I want to be alive and to love someone so deeply that their happiness genuinely matters to me as if it were my own. I want to feel that strange, almost unbearable tenderness of looking at another person and thinking, of all the people in the world, somehow I found you. I want to be able to say, without shame or strategy or calculation, that I am happy you exist.

Maybe that is what it means to fall in love courageously; not to believe you cannot break, but to know that you can, and to open your heart anyway.