Certain annihilations apply

Of course, having made a plea for the importance and authenticity of the experience of falling in love and the loss often associated with it, I can also see why friends and counselors adopt a skeptical, protective, and rational stance. 

As true as it may be that any two lovers who have fallen in love and who risk the vulnerability, exposure, tenderness, trust, and intimacy of that experience are absolutely unique in relationship to each other, everything dear and sacred about that experience is highly likely to be destroyed. 

Whatever seems special to one's lover will be shared with someone else. Whatever flatters our ego most will be a quality or experience in some other man that will rouse the same response from our lover. The most exposed, shameless and tender of all experiences will be shared with someone else. That's the highest likelihood. Nothing will be protected, nothing will be tended or kept safe and secret, nothing will last and be treated with the protective shield it may deserve, probably by either party. 

The most searing and tender, vulnerable ways we open our heart will be destroyed. Those secret and sacred ways will be destroyed either by oblivion and forgetting, or by outright intentional malice, resentment and bitterness, or by duplicity, betrayal and abandonment. These just seem to me to be lain facts out of 42 years of experience in this arena. I have been unconscionably destructive, sometimes even taking the most valuable and sahing it to the ground without even having a second thought. This has also been done to me. 

So it makes sense that those who would like to keep us safe, make us steady and sure, put us back on some kind of solid ground, or otherwise protect us, would introduce some skepticism and even cynicism. We take what is best and most tender in ourselves and open it to a very dangerous animal indeed. The most dangerous animal, in many ways. Another human being. And all of this in spite of an abundance of evidence that we human beings are fickle, flighty, selfish, unthinking, perhaps essential unkind. Unkind and vicious by nature, with kindness and compassion seeming to require years of work and practice. 

Nevertheless, I still advocate for the authenticity and importance of falling in love and its associated losses. Pema Chodron's sign comes to mind, that she had in her bathroom for years:

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”

Because it is obsidian, and because it is my heart

It may be a somewhat overly dramatic "one liner." Maybe we can find that which is indestructible in some other ways. Maybe the stabbing pain of loss is not necessary "annihilating" but simply difficult. But, regardless, showing up for the open heart when life asks it of us seems to me the only living, pulsing, breathing and real choice.