The art of overcoming fear to find love

Since writing this blog, I’ve assumed the role of relationship counselor for many friends  and happily so! To all those telling me your stories keep doing so because it gives me great material for these blogs. One common thread among those seeking love is fear – of rejection, of a failed relationship, of over exposure and then it struck me what love in its nakedness is all about …embracing fear. 

We begin with our quest for love with a fear of rejection, I know many people happily in relationships now who fought entry into a relationship because they didn’t want to ask the girl they were interested in out. It’s what also helps maintain sexist roles in relationships…most women shy away from the idea of asking the man of their interest out for that same fear. Most of us concede that since we do a great deal within the relationship, we deserve courtship and deserve not to go through the humiliation of knocking on one’s heart and having that door shut in our faces. Like a Monet painting what seems nice from far can be a huge mess up close, so we even avoid finger-painting  and just dabbling in it.

When a relationship falls apart there is another fear that takes over…the fear of falling for someone because of the all consuming changes in life that quickly follow those three words that take a world of mustered courage to exclaim. Having loved and lost, a tower of terror is quickly built to barricade one’s emotions.  I have one friend now happily in a relationship who after her first breakup, swore off love for a year. It happened as everyone said it does, love came when she wasn’t looking and she fought it with all of her strength. In her mind, she would have happily never loved again because the work required to sustain a healthy relationship was frankly too daunting for her to invest herself into it. Courage is said to be fear that has said its prayers, so she said hers, embraced love and gave fear the flick.

Her relationship before this crumbled because of another type of fear; fear of physicality and stuffing it up! In her first relationship she was unable to show affection. She put this down to her conservative upbringing and her inexperience. She was wrong. The entire relationship was and that’s what had held her back from taking a leap of faith and a pirouette into passion. Her second relationship was different. Her new love made sure of it and with that security came the removal of fear of intimacy. It was something that even the most experienced had faced at some point in their relationships. 

Another friend shared a similar story of her first time with her new boyfriend. Emotionally famished from relationships’ passed, she had no desire to satiate her new boyfriends hunger for her. She was robbed of her ability to reciprocate love because of the avaricious way that her affection had previously been sought. Love; once tightly knit was unwoven and tangled and needed her new sweetheart to stitch up her old heart. Without pressure or persistence, he promised her a lifetime of love at her leisure. She found somebody to fix the seams of her frayed heart and her fear of being hurt diminished. 

For a while, fear of losing her love reared its insecure head in her relationship. Nothing but God had a promise of forever but for some reason, the brave of us keep seeking love.

I wondered why anyone would stupidly throw themselves into a situation that they feared and the answer of why we try came through Ernest Hemingway. I’ve always been a huge fan of his writing because he has great conviction in his commentary.  He is frank and I love honesty even if I disagree with it.

One of my favorites (that I do agree with) is when he said “the best way to know if you can trust someone is to trust them.” It is so perfect in its simplicity. 

What is indirectly explained is that in order to cure our curiosity, we face fear to fall in love and answer our own questions about people. 

Hemingway is also famed for saying, “man can only be destroyed, but never defeated.” To say this means we never truly lose in love, we learn lessons, we gain confidence in our ability to give love, we solve the mystery of what we’re looking for and though emotionally, temporarily, we feel destroyed, we are never completely overcome by the battle. 

We’re all amateur artists, trying to craft a future for ourselves. In our painting, a significant other will often appear, and with every heartbreak a new stroke of our brushes better defines what the significant other should look like. 

We fear error but we need trial to complete the picture. We take our time, because you can’t rush an artist and we fight fear for love, for the chance of living the masterpiece.