On Being Terrified of Love

Whenever talk turns to being terrified of love, the implication is that the only people ever to be scared of such an emotion would be the demented ones. How silly to draw away from intimacy. How ridiculous to spoil trust with suspicions and evasions. Of course the love-shy are unwell, it’s love we’re talking about, not torture or ruin.

But what if we began with the evidence. Given how love stories typically go, how normal is it to keep being excited by romance, by the prospect of meeting someone new, of one day taking our clothes off in front of them and of trusting them with one’s most dependent and weakest sides?

What if – after a calm examination of statistics – those who discussed the ‘fear of intimacy’ as if it were an affliction that targeted only the mad turned out to be in their own way the maddest of all? The mystery is not that men and women occasionally go strange at the prospect of love but that they ever dare do anything else, given what can happen, given what usually happens, given what has happened already.

Of course they seem nice on the early dates, they always do, but the reality is that we won’t know for a year, probably two, possibly ten, who they are deep inside – by which time we won’t have much of our brief lives left, let alone much of our courage or our faith. They may talk sweetly of their cousin or their job; they may make a joke about their ice cream or the people at the next table. But what lies beneath this show of normality, what pathologies are being held carefully at bay – until we’ve given them nicknames, become endeared by their hands and their eyes and grown unable to live without them? When we think of the first evening with x, one would have needed a machine that hasn’t yet been invented to detect the slightest sign of trouble – and that one cost us almost half a decade and a substantial part of our sanity. ‘Please, just tell me right now how you are going to ruin my life,’ we might want to telescope matters to exclaim. 

Let’s admit the truth: we don’t and can’t really trust anyone. Not because we are mean, not because we set out to operate with ingrained misanthropy, but because we are following what life keeps teaching us. We might have the devil opposite us or our saviour; we wouldn’t have a clue one way or the other. 

Therefore, if they invite us back, if they ask if they can see us again, if they message rather quickly, we may end up having to come across as a little bizarre. We may have to conjure up a headache or a crisis at work. It isn’t the height of maturity but then nor is what we have had to endure from their peers in our last three relationships. We want love so much and yet, in some moods, we really don’t want any of it at all. We just want to be in our own bed, curled up, safe, small, maybe with someone else cleverer and wiser than we are off-stage taking care of everything that we’re too young or too old to make sense of.