Are you afraid of love?

Many people are afraid of being loved. They don't trust that they can be loved. They don't trust when other people say they love them. They're not sure why someone would love them, or what kind of person would want to love them.

But that wasn't my question.

What I'm asking is: are you afraid of your own love? Are you afraid of loving? Are you afraid of showing someone your love? Your love for them, your love for others, your love for the world in general?

Love is neither a sensation nor a feeling. Love is what opens us to feeling, what makes every sensation matter. It's the fluttering hope and the heavy heartsink. It's the fear, the trust, the giddiness, the sorrow. When we are not in love, contentment is barely a feeling: it's a low neutral, almost invisible. Contentment in love, however, feels like it suffuses the entire world: it hangs in the sky, it rustles the leaves on trees, it is birdsong, it is trains passing, it is the sound of your own breath.

My favorite definition of love when I was young is: it is a verb. When we say it moves us, we mean that literally: it is what drives and inspires, what takes us high and sends us low. The world seems bigger when you love, because suddenly the world is worth taking in. Everything is easier in love, because everything is worth doing for what feels like the first time.

But love brings fear, and love brings pain. And love's pain and love's terror are the same thing: that our love doesn't matter, that our love shouldn't exist, that our love is worse than no love at all.

The opposite of love isn't quite hate, and it isn't entirely heartbreak. It's ignorance and apathy and rejection: not seeing, not caring, and—worst of all—not wanting. All the things which make love meaningless. All the things which make people meaningless, because what we love makes us who we are, just as the things we don't love articulate all the things that we aren't.

This is about more than romantic love. This is about joy. This is about the innocent love, the simple things which make us smile—and it's about our earliest experiences of being unable to share that joy. The more innocuous moments, where we simply don't know how to express what we love, or why we love it. The frustrating ones where our love is clearly not shared. And the upsetting ones, where our love is met with scorn, dismissal, condemnation. It's frivolous to love what you love. It's inappropriate. There are better things to love. Your loving that means you're stupid or tasteless or annoying. It is inconvenient, in other words, that you love. You and your love are little more than nuisances.

At some point, we are told, our love is needy. Needy: the word that means your very existence is a burden. How dare you need something, not just from someone, but at all? How dare you hurt? How dare you long? How dare you be afraid? Your tears, your are told, are you at your very worst—not only do you insist on trying to love, not only do you exist on feeling wounded and afraid, but you share your pain? As if it's anybody's business that you're unhappy, or that you're hurting, but your own?

Pain and fear are parts of love, just as wanting comes from love as well. Not all love is needy, but neediness is itself an expression of love. Because how we feel is how we love. Allowing ourselves to have emotions is how we let ourselves love ourselves. When you don't love yourself, you deny or suppress or loathe your feelings: you perceive them, not just as inconvenient, but as inappropriate, as deeply and viscerally wrong. Neediness stems from a lack of trust: the moment you trust someone to care about you, about your feelings, about your who and where and why and how, there is no longer any need. Rather: the need is met the moment you feel it. This is trust: that when you need something or someone, it will be there.

When our love is rejected, when our feelings are summed up and dismissed as unilaterally needy, what we are being told is: There is no reason for you to trust me. Or worse: There is nobody you can trust. You will never be wanted, you will never be valued. The love you feel is worse than nothingness. Your entire existence is a blight.

So we negotiate. We don our masks. We compromise our entire selves away.

What do you value? What do you want? What makes you happy? What do you think you love? I'll become that. Let me be that. Let me be worthy as you define it. I will do anything, anything, if it means that you will offer me your love.

It won't work. But it may seem to work, at least for a while, at least as long as we break our backs trying not to let the mask slip even for a second. It is neverending hard work, and it never feels like enough. Because we know—we know, even if no one else does—that it's all a lie. We know that we're not making love, we're faking it: faking that we are worthy of it, pretending that there's anything worth loving there.

The fear then is that it will not work forever. We feel like we are going to sabotage ourselves: like the "real" us is conspiring to stab us in the back. Unless we fight back against ourselves at every hour of every day, we will destroy everything we've worked so hard to find. One little slip, one little admission of ourselves, could brand us unworthy of someone's love forever.

When they don't love us enough, when they neglect us, when they don't care enough to notice us at all... that's confirmation that we didn't do enough. It's proof that, somewhere along the line, a little part of us leaked out—a little bit of neediness, a little bit of love—and destroyed our chances forever. Or else it's evidence that we can't even fake it. That the person we're pretending to be, the real person whose identity we've stolen, will forever and naturally be better than us, more worthy, more lovable, no matter how hard we try.

But isn't that all worth it?

Isn't that waking nightmare worth it, for the sake of love?

Sometimes, they even love us. They say they love us, and we know they mean it. They say "I love you," and our heart swells until it bursts, and we wonder why, half an hour later, we can't even remember feeling that way. How is it that their love for us disappears so readily? Are we really that needy? Are we really that ungrateful?

Is that why nobody loves us? Because even when they do love us, it never, ever seems to be enough?

Of course that's not why.

The real answer is that there are two different ways to love. There's the common kind, where we love the way somebody makes us feel, we love the way they make us love, we love every experience that we have when we're with them.

Sometimes that's even the real deal. But you can find yourself loving a construct, loving a performance, as if the person you were loving is real. Study someone closely. Take every pain to be exactly what they tell you that they want. Love them, even. See if they don't say they love you back. How could they not, when you're working so hard to be deserving of their love?

But what, then, is their love? When they say they love you, are they giving you their love? The love you make them feel, all your pleasures and delights? Or are they loving your love, your feelings, your sorrows and your joys?

Do they say they love you because you let them love?

Or do they say they love you because they love your love, because they know that loving the way you love is the truest, deepest way of loving you?

When I was younger, I loved the thought that "love" is a verb. But my favorite definition of love is this: it is putting something that isn't you at the center of your world. Putting the rest of you aside, because all that matters is the part of you that knows and feels and lives with something, the part of you that is that thing.

Whatever you love in life, by this definition, is the thing that makes you forget yourself, because you are that thing. And when you love someone, the part of them you love is the part of them that you experience. If you love the way they make you feel, all you really love is your own feeling. Love their face, love the scent of them, and you are loving the sensation of them. To love someone deeply, you must love the way that they love: not necessarily what they take in, but that they take it in, that it transforms them, that their inner life is defined by this experience, by this feeling, by this thing.

Love what they feel, not what they make you feel. Love, not just the sensation of them, but every sensation that defines them, that defines their life, as if it were their own. Lose yourself in their laughter and keen with their sorrows. Trust in them to love you, and you will find your way back to your own feelings, but through their eyes: the things your happiness means to them, the way your smile makes them feel. Love yourself as they love you. And trust that you are lovable, that you are worthy of their love, that your love is worth loving, because in your love for them, their love for you is the only part of you that matters anymore.

The heartbreak of rejection, and the heartbreak of neglect, are both tremendously painful. But the heartbreak of love lost is worst of all: the feeling, not just that you are unloved or that you may never have been loved, but that you were loved, and that you knew yourself by that love, and now you may never know yourself again. Once upon a time, your love meant something. Once upon a time, the way that you love mattered. Who will let you love them now? Who will take in your love, and cherish it as their own—and cherish you that way, as if no part of you is move worth loving than the love you have, not just for others, but for the world, for life itself?

To be loved is to be free to love.

To be loved is to trust that you can love, and that you should love.

To be loved is to let go of the fear you have of love. Not the fear you have of being loved, although it will surely feel that way to you, but the secret fear. The fear you have of loving. The fear you have of your own love. The fear that you are not enough, because, deep down, all you have is love, all you are is love, because what really makes you you is that you can give yourself away, you can love so dearly that you become everything and anything that you're loving, you can drop the mask and give up your self-consciousness and simply be with every little thing that deserves your love, that is worthy of your love. Because the real fear, the secret hidden knowledge, is of how much you love, of just how much seems worth your loving. The fear is that it's too much or it's unwanted or it's inconvenient or that, because you love as much as you love, you're somehow loving wrongly, or cheaply, rather than simply loving in abundance and freely and without fear.

Do you let yourself love? Do you love the way you ought to love, the way you could love, the kind of love that barely thinks of trust, because it needs no permission or approval, it only needs to be? Do you love without bargaining, without treating your love like it's too precious to dispense with, because it's the only way you know how to receive love in turn? Do you love, knowing that others' love for you must be freely given, that you are free to look for love and therefore free to give it, just as you are free to get away from love that isn't there, love that you wish was there but can't find?

Or does love feel like a negotiation? Does it feel like something you need to trap and wheedle out of someone else? When someone loves you, do you still feel terror? And how much of that terror is the fear that you are not loved for your love, that you are loved for something you have to demonstrate, something you have to earn, something you have to prove? Do you negotiate so ruthlessly with love because, if you aren't careful, your love will be degraded and devalued and mistreated and neglected, as if you yourself can be taken for granted, as if your love is somehow separate from you, as if it's offered meaninglessly and is little more than pleasant, a warm beam of sunlight that they won't miss when it's gone?

Are you afraid of love?

Are you afraid of being loved, because you don't feel worthy of their love, because you still don't trust that your love itself is worthy? Are you afraid of being loved because, if you slip up and let yourself love too much, your love itself will be the reason why they cast you out, shove you aside?

Or are you ready to love, and ready to look for love? Ready to look, not just for any kind of love, but for the kind that takes yours in and loves it too, the kind of lover that's needy for your love, that admits they need your love, because they know that, more than anything, you are looking for a chance to love them, an opportunity to show them just how deeply and readily and eagerly and easily you love? Are you ready for the kind of love that asks you to love back, that craves it desperately, that offers you a life, not just of being loved, but of feeling love every single day?

Maybe you already have it, and know it, and struggle to remember who you were without it. Because once you find it, once you realize it, it can be difficult to forget.

It's not just romantic love. It's each and every person in your life who you not only love, but know that, when you say "I love you" to them, they cherish it—because they know that, when you love them, you are giving yourself to them, you are letting them have you as you really are. And when they say "I love you" back, what they are saying is that they love that version of you: they love the part of you that loves, because they know you to be the most loving version of yourself.

Then, and only then, are you loved. Loved as you are. Loved for who you are. For being poetry in motion. Loved for being love itself.