Vulnerability + Love

For the past few months, I’ve been surrounded by love. My best friend, Melissa, and I got engaged just 2 months apart in 2022. We both had about 18-month engagement periods before our wedding dates, so while it was a longer process/waiting period, once things kicked off, they really kicked off.

Starting at the end of 2023, I really started to truly feel the love that was all around me. Seeing Melissa so happy, in love and preparing for the biggest day of her life while I was doing the same was nothing short of an amazing feeling.

Which got me thinking: how often do we really get to experience romantic love so pure? I know I experience pure love with my family, my friends, my dog (lol)… but romantic love? Not nearly as often, even with people you’ve told you loved, at least for me personally.

I think romantic love takes a hit at an early age. It starts off when you’re young and have a crush on someone, and they don’t like you back. I think that’s where the initial “damage” starts to form, only to continue on with each crush you have after that doesn’t work out for whatever reason. So by the time you get to your first actual relationship, your “first love”, the walls are already kind of up because you know what it’s like to have your feelings hurt, and no one wants to experience that again. I know my first “love” (in the long run, absolutely wasn’t, but at the time, we thought we did, so we’ll count it for this blog) really did a number on me, but I didn’t even go into that relationship fresh and unprepared for what a heartbreak would feel like, simply because my feelings had been hurt before. Yes, there’s different levels of heartbreak, and getting your feelings hurt doesn’t amount to the first time someone you love does you wrong, but in the end, it’s all categorized as bad feelings. The result of that just ends up with a person closing off their heart more and more.

Now that I’m about to get married, I’m realizing how vulnerable I’m being with my love for the first time in so long. How vulnerable he’s being. How vulnerable I got to watch Melissa and her husband be with one another. It’s something I don’t think I can say I’ve felt this intensely since I had my first crush as a kid.

For the first time in so long, I don’t have any walls up. I’m ready to 100% give myself to another human being.

I’ve been working on my vows, and the genuine, real, raw emotion I’m putting into them is a side of myself that I don’t get to tap in and reveal very often. It’s a freeing feeling to know that I feel safe enough to do so. That I feel comfortable enough to tell another person how I feel, all while knowing they feel the same way.

It’s unfortunate that we can’t always be so vulnerable with our love when we don’t know the intentions of the other person. But those moments that we do are what true love is all about– at least to me.