Love Is Risk

Love is risk. Love is stepping forward without knowing what is on the other side. It’s both breathing deeply and forgetting how to breathe at the same time, but trusting that you’ll catch your breath when you fall into someone else’s arms.

Love is risk. Love is wanting nothing more than to run, but believing that things will get better, that connections will deepen, that despite two people’s imperfection, something beautiful can be born.

Love is closing your eyes and pulling another body close. Replacing fear with faith.

Love is risk. Love is no answers or guarantees, no promises of a forever, no reassurance or even backup plans. It is blind, but intentional. Fearless, but not foolish. It is the searching and hoping and deciding that it’s better to fall and be broken than never feel anything at all.

Love is risk. Love is the potential of being destroyed, of losing yourself, of walking away with a shattered heart and nothing to say for yourself except that you tried. It’s willingly handing over your heart, even when every thought running through your mind is hesitant. It’s quieting those voices. It’s saying yes.

Love is risk. Risk of pain. Risk of heartbreak. Risk of security and stability and all that you’ve built up to protect yourself, suddenly being destroyed. But it’s a beautiful risk. It’s a worthy risk. It’s a complex and messy and filling and incredibly wonderful risk that we willingly take when we find someone whose heartbeat matches our own.

And so we take it. Again and again.

We step forward. We trust. We let go of the fear and the doubt and the hesitation and the caution from the world and we believe that two imperfect people can care about one another with everything they have.

And sometimes we fall. Sometimes we break. Sometimes we shatter and have to learn to rebuild again.

But without risk there’s no reward. Without risk, there’s no knowing what could have been. Without risk, there’s nothing beautiful, nothing made or grown or built with fragile, imperfect hands.

Without risk, there is no true connection, no true emotion, no two bodies being brought together by fate and faith chance and choice.

Without risk, there is nothing real.

So yes, love is risk.
And we can’t avoid the beautiful danger.