Love is almost always associated with being vulnerable. Romantic love, even more so. The uncertain nature of romantic love often makes people fearful about revealing the true intensity of their feelings. Most people fear that by being vulnerable they’ll either push the other person away or open themselves up to being hurt.
Brené Brown, in her book Daring Greatly (2012), defines vulnerability as “a state of emotional exposure that comes with a certain degree of uncertainty. It involves a person’s willingness to accept the emotional risk that comes from being open and willing to love and be loved. It’s that unstable feeling we get when we step out of our comfort zone or do something that forces us to loosen control.”
At the same time, she says, one has to be vulnerable if one wants to take great strides. One also has to be vulnerable in order to form any kind of real connection.
How does a person continue to be vulnerable when he or she has been hurt deeply whenever they were vulnerable in the past? Nina, a 32-year-old client of mine in Singapore, has been in five serious relationships. As we broke down how and why each of her relationships ended in heartbreak for her, we found that the end often began because of a tendency she has to “jump the gun”, as she put it, and declare her intense feelings early on in a relationship.
Now, Nina is petrified of sharing her “real” feelings with a man she is currently dating. She is afraid she will “ruin things again” if she lets him know how much he already means to her (they’ve been dating for just over three months). Yet, she wants to take their equation from casual dating to the next level: a committed relationship. That’s why she sought me out.
The simplest way to take her relationship to the next level, I told her, is to tell the man how she feels. Nina is uncomfortable doing this. But I believe that, in any long-term relationship, one must be able to express who one is and what one is feeling, even if those feelings and their intensity seem “unusual”?
After all, how long can one hide one’s true self, or pretend to feel or not feel a certain way? Would she even want to be in a relationship where she was frequently wondering when she would trip herself up?
To hide one’s true self is to create a barrier between oneself and one’s partner, and even if that barrier keeps the relationship intact for longer, I would argue that it was hurting the foundation of the bond all the while, and causing the relationship itself to be something of an illusion, a mirage.
There’s no denying that Nina’s past relationship experiences have been hurtful and emotionally scarring. That has not stopped her for from wanting to love and be loved. This is admirable. She puts herself out there. With the right person, declaring her feelings early on would give her the result she wants: the trust and sense of belonging that I call “being at home”, the feeling of being able to let one’s guard down.
Being vulnerable in any relationship is difficult. Love can be a fragile thing, and there is no formula for how much to share, when, at what risk. I always advise clients to ask themselves one clarifying question: Do you want to be with someone who would judge you for what you are concealing?
The powerful thing about being vulnerable is that it allows you to, as Brown puts it, take great leaps. It allows you to own who you are. It also gets you into the right relationship, and then makes nurturing that relationship easier.
It takes courage to be vulnerable. But it’s not a one-time thing either. It’s a habit one must cultivate in order to have a total and lived experience of human existence.
(Simran Mangharam is a dating and relationship coach and can be reached on [email protected])
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