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?
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.