“What is the point? It all ends badly.”

“Well, if you never give it a shot, you will not know how it might end, isn’t it?”

I was recently talking to a friend who was talking about how he hasn’t dated anyone in a long time. No reason. Just fear. It is as simple as that. He talked about how by now, at 28, he was too jaded to give love another shot. So many things held him back: the fear of getting hurt, the whole effort of investing only to find it gone to waste, the belief that maybe there was no one out there for him after all.

After dating a few people, we tend to wonder these things at some point in our lives. We all have been there, many of us are still there. Somehow, everywhere I go, I see broken hearts, people getting over someone, scared to fall in love.

And what do they do out of that fear? They “protect their hearts”. But really, after a point, is it really protecting our hearts that we are doing, or simply caging it in?

We often forget that relationships come and go. Love isn’t a limited quantifiable resource that will exhaust after a while. That is the best thing about emotions, they are inexhaustible. Our patience on the other hand, we can’t say the same thing for.

So while we let go of the idea of love and give up on putting ourselves out there, our hearts aren’t then programmed and hard wired to just stop feeling. Love comes unannounced, sometimes it leaves the same way too. But we forget the former, and remind ourselves of the latter all the time. Also it helps to remember that no two experiences are the same, eh?

But the truth of the matter is, if we think about it really what are our hearts doing if not loving. Not loving, not caring, saved from hurt, aren’t we then limiting ourselves from feeling the complete bandwidth of how much we can love and also keeping ourselves closed to a wonderful feeling of companionship and sharing space with someone in a way different from all the other bonds in our life.

All of us have been hurt, all of us at one point in our lives have felt what it to be unloved…and maybe instead of shutting each other out we should find peace in the fact that we are all in this together, that the pain you have felt is what the other person, or the person after that has felt too. Maybe that will make us more sensitive lovers, daters, partners.

And maybe after a while, we won’t feel so scared of giving love another shot.

Maybe after a while, we won’t cage our hearts in; we will let it soar and be free to land where it may and one of those times, it will find another home.