The first time someone told me they loved me—really loved me, not the casual version but the kind that implies seeing and choosing—I felt terror as much as joy. Because being loved meant being known, and being known meant risking the discovery that I was less worthy of love than the carefully curated version of myself I’d been presenting.
We think we want love, and we do, but we also fear it with equal intensity. Love demands vulnerability, requires truth, insists on intimacy. Love asks us to be ourselves completely, and most of us aren’t sure we can handle the risk of someone seeing us fully and potentially walking away.
Being unloved is lonely, but it’s also safe. It confirms our fears without challenging our defenses. It allows us to maintain the fiction that we’re unlovable because we haven’t been truly seen, not because we’ve been seen and found wanting. Rejection before revelation feels less devastating than rejection after. As long as no one knows the real me, I can tell myself they would love me if they did. Once they know me and leave, that story collapses.
But being loved—really loved—dismantles every excuse we’ve constructed for our self-protection. When someone loves us despite our flaws, we can no longer hide behind the belief that our imperfections disqualify us from connection. When someone chooses us repeatedly, we can no longer maintain that we’re fundamentally unchosen. The love becomes inconvenient evidence against the narrative of unworthiness we’ve been nursing for years.
I remember when Happy first said she loved me, how my immediate thought wasn’t joy but panic. What if she was wrong? What if she loved an idea of me rather than the actual me? What if I couldn’t sustain the performance of being someone worthy of her love? The terror was so strong I almost ended the relationship right there, almost walked away before she could discover her mistake and leave me devastated.
Love forces us to confront the possibility that we might actually be worthy of good things, and that confrontation terrifies us almost as much as the possibility that we aren’t. Because if we’re worthy of love, then we’re responsible for receiving it, for believing in it, for letting it change us. We can no longer hide in the comfortable misery of victimhood, can no longer blame our loneliness entirely on external circumstances. If someone sees us fully and still loves us, then maybe our self-hatred has been inaccurate, and confronting that inaccuracy means rebuilding our entire relationship with ourselves.
There’s also the weight of reciprocity: being loved means someone has invested their heart in us, made themselves vulnerable to our choices, trusted us with their emotional wellbeing. Their love becomes our responsibility, and responsibility feels heavier than loneliness sometimes. When Happy tells me she loves me, I feel the weight of that trust, the knowledge that my actions can hurt her, that I have power over someone’s happiness. It’s easier to be alone, hurting only myself, than to be loved and risk hurting someone who matters.
Maybe this is why we sabotage good relationships, why we find fault with people who see value in us, why we’re more comfortable with partners who confirm our low opinion of ourselves than with those who challenge it. Familiar rejection feels safer than unfamiliar acceptance. I’ve watched myself do this—picking fights over nothing, withdrawing when Happy gets too close, finding reasons to be dissatisfied when things are going well. The self-sabotage isn’t conscious, but it’s consistent, as if some part of me is more comfortable with loss I create than love I have to trust.
The fear of being loved and the fear of not being loved create an impossible double bind: we’re terrified of remaining alone and equally terrified of being chosen. We want love desperately while simultaneously pushing it away when it arrives. We spend years lonely, then when someone offers genuine connection, we find reasons why it won’t work, why they’re not right, why the timing is off. The goalpost keeps moving because the real issue isn’t finding love but accepting it.
But perhaps the terror is just love’s way of announcing its significance, its power to transform, its demand that we grow large enough to receive what we’ve always claimed to want. The fear isn’t a sign we’re doing something wrong—it’s a sign we’re doing something that matters, something that requires us to be braver and more open than we’ve been before.
Tonight I want to practice being afraid of love and letting myself be loved anyway—not because the fear disappears, but because the love is worth facing the fear. I want to let Happy love me without immediately questioning her judgment, to receive Arash’s affection without wondering if I deserve it, to accept that maybe I am worthy of good things even though accepting that means I can no longer hide behind unworthiness as an excuse for not fully showing up in my life. The terror might never completely leave, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe courage isn’t the absence of fear but the decision to stay open despite it, to let love in even when every instinct says to protect yourself by closing down. Maybe being loved isn’t supposed to feel safe—it’s supposed to feel like the risk it is, like handing someone your heart knowing they could break it, like choosing vulnerability over protection, like deciding that connection matters more than safety. The terror is real, but so is the love. Tonight, I choose the love.
