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Recently I came across a love quote and up until this day I’m still quite surprised by how much it has made me reflect on the way I see love and how I love. The quote comes from a 1996 film called Dream for an Insomniac:

This quote grips me, because it’s antithetical to what I’d previously believed in. I had always advised my girlfriends, NEVER invest more than what you think the other party is putting in: “Don’t like/love him more than he likes/loves you.” Because it’s not safe for your heart. Because you might get hurt, you might fall too deep, you might lose control of your own emotions and thoughts. Because he might not be worth it after all.

But I was wrong. Now I know otherwise.

Love should be mad, reckless and dangerous. It ought to be! It should require your every ounce of courage and every iota of strength. Love like you’re doing a bungee jump. Take the risk. Love like it’s all or nothing. Give your best. Because we only have one life to live.

If you don’t love fiercely and carelessly right now, then when? When you’re eighty years old sitting on a wheelchair?

Abandon yourself and your logical reasoning. Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not.” Maybe what we all need is a bit more of “crazy” and less of that logical thinking and self-restraint.

At some point you will realize that the more you try to dissect love to study and understand it, the less you know and the more confused you get. Perhaps love is not something we can try and calculate, and its worth, not something we have all learned to fully appreciate yet.

So love, even if it’s going to hurt afterwards. Love, even if you don’t know what the future holds. Like C.S. Lewis said, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” Love, and be loved like you just don’t care. Love without fearing. Love without trying to control it. Because fear and control only diminish the glory and beauty of love, making it just another “mediocre thing in life.”

Now is time to let love become something it should be. Something extraordinary.

Next time when love comes to you, think of it as an incoming wave, dive in and immerse yourself in it. I promise you that you will come up as a new person.