Love and Vulnerability

As I start plotting out a couple more books, and as always life events tend to shape that process, I start looking at what is it about love that makes people vulnerable? In my own life, I have been been through good and bad, like most people. I have moments that I thought I was so totally in love that I didn't believe anything could penetrate that and destroy it, but as there have also been times I have been hurt I now make a conscious decision to keep my heart guarded from that which makes me vulnerable.

What's that moment in time that you consciously decide you can't take the hurt or pain any more and never want to go through it again....yet in the back of your mind you still hope for that happily ever after and the one true love that will always be there for you. As a writer, I get to write that ending in my stories and portray that hope for that type of love through my stories.

I have spent a great deal of time in the past week thinking about this. About the risks of putting your heart out there after you have been hurt. We all want to be that priority in someone's life, be the one that they think of first thing when they wake up and last thing when they go to bed, be that one that brings a smile to their face during the day just because they are thinking of you. How do you protect your heart from the hurt that could follow when you make yourself vulnerable.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis penned a lesson on the danger of holding one’s heart too tightly. He writes:

    To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

After stumbling across the above statement, and doing an exhausting amount of thinking on this subject this week, I have come to the conclusion that it is much better to put your heart out there and run the risk of getting it broken once again than to have it become unbreakable, impenetrable and irredeemable.  I would rather love and be vulnerable than hide my heart away in the name of protection.