Foreboding love

Remember me proudly announcing that I don’t need to be with Tony but choose to be with him? How it’s so important to remember impermanence and not make false promises of security or stability in relationships?

Well, I’ve been analysing that a bit recently…

I realised that I need to constantly assert my independence and stress these beliefs in order to convince myself. I desperately need to believe this to be true in order to feel protected in case the worst-case scenario happened.

Brene Brown calls this ‘foreboding joy’. It means that one protects oneself from fully experiencing the uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure of joy by assuming the worst.

In my case, I think it’s more appropriate to speak of ‘foreboding love’. I’ve developed a protective mechanism of convincing myself that I don’t need anyone in order to protect myself from fully experiencing the uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure that comes with loving someone.

The problem is that this ‘vulnerability shield’ not only doesn’t offer any protection at all when the worst-case scenario actually happens but it also robs you of enjoying what you have.

So with 18 days left to go before Tony comes home I’m deciding to stop foreboding love and to instead allow myself to be crazy in love.

Who says that you can’t go back to the excitement of the first few months? I’m not sure I fully experienced it the first time round so I feel like I have a lot of making up to do.