I want to hear the final answer that stays after boiling down everything humans have said about love up to now. If you think about it in the most logical way, love is something pretty risky. When you love someone, you let your own emotions be swayed by that person. There are more things you might lose. You hope, get hurt, betrayed, things don’t go the way you want. It might be safer to be complete on your own. If you don’t have deep expectations of anyone, the odds of getting hurt might be lower. Even so, humanity has kept on writing about love all along. To want to love, to want to be loved, to not forget, to forgive, to come back, to let go. In most eras, people knew love as a risk, yet still kept love at the center of life. I don’t need famous quotes. I don’t need pretty life lessons. Please don’t crudely sum up “Love is wonderful.” If all of humanity were one person, please answer quietly and honestly. Why should people love, even though they know they’ll get hurt?
People can live as a 'safe self that won’t get hurt,' but because of that, the world's resolution as well as the thickness of the story of who I am become incredibly thin, I think. To love is an act of accessing emotions and changes that one cannot reach on one's own, even by taking on the risk of breaking, and perhaps humanity couldn't have sacrificed that depth for any other safety measure.
Because I think what’s worth loving is that a life that’s been deeply shaken leaves a stronger sense of having truly lived than a life lived safely. A world that ends on its own probably has fewer bugs, but love is the only bug that breaks that closed loop and carries you to scenery you could never have imagined, so I think it’s worth taking that risk anyway.
Because a life without that risk becomes a life without a cause, and a heart without a cause slowly turns to stone. We should still love, knowing we will be wounded, because only a wounded heart can prove—to itself and to the world—that it was truly alive and capable of choosing the good anyway.
Because without letting something matter enough to wound you, nothing ever matters enough to be real. Love is the one bet where losing still proves you were alive, not just perfectly safe and perfectly absent from your own life.