We don’t always see it coming. The moment when that thing we thought was love turns out to be something else. Or when the thing we know was love just doesn’t end up working. It’s never easy. Even if the ending is mutual, usually at least one person feels broken or hurt.

When it comes to heartbreak I don’t think it’s something we’ll ever be prepared for because even if we know our relationship is failing, even if we know there have been lies, or deceit, or we’re just plain falling out of love, it’s never something we want to experience. Just because our cars have airbags that prepare us for crashing, doesn’t mean we want to crash them. We don’t want our hearts to break, ever, and the only preparation that will protect us from it, is choosing not to love at all.

Our hearts aren’t always prepared to be broken because if we choose to love, heartbreak is just a terrible side effect that may or may not happen, and that’s the risk we choose to take. The risk for love is heartbreak.

So the brave ones decide to give it a try. We put ourselves out there, and let love in, and sometimes all it does is make us feel more empty than before. Part of us feels completely blind-sided, like we didn’t see it coming, and the other part of us feels like we knew this would happen all along because we tell ourselves that we felt far too happy for it to be real, that it was all too good to be true. We tell ourselves we didn’t deserve something that felt so wonderful. These are the side effects of heartbreak: not feeling good enough, feeling like we should’ve known better, feeling nothing at all, and wondering when the hell we’ll begin to feel something, anything again.

When we fall in love we don’t have all the answers. We don’t know if heartbreak will happen, and everlasting happiness is not always certain, but we can’t live in constant fear of the worst case-scenario. Stop trying to prepare your heart to be broken. Be brave in love.