How to Fall in Love Safely

Falling in love is beautiful. It happens when we meet someone we find attractive, have a good connection with, and who seems to reciprocate our interest.

While looking for love, we have been carrying a hole in our hearts. We tried to ignore it by focusing on our daily activities. We kept busy with work, friends, or fitness, all in the hope of forgetting how lonely we had been feeling.

We have been doing our best to numb our loneliness, and now, finally, we are very close to filling the hole in our hearts, deeply connecting with someone, and being finally fully understood.

All our problems at work and our adult duties feel lighter and easier to overcome with the prospect of a new romantic relationship starting.

All we care about and all we think about is our soon-to-be partner, as it is the sole escape we are seeing from the painful emotional state we have been living in and trying to ignore so far.

We are falling in love, and it is an amazing feeling, yet also very dangerous.

If the person we are falling for won’t be there to catch us, we will hurt ourselves, and we will be left alone dealing with the pain of a broken heart.

Heartache is extremely painful. We all go through it. It is unavoidable, but at least we can learn to mitigate the pain. We should develop a healthier outlook on love and learn to love ourselves so that when we fall in love, we do it safely.

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No daydreaming

The first mistake we make when we start catching feelings for someone is to daydream.

We let our emotions carry us away and begin playing with our fantasies.

We may just have had a good first date, a few moments of connection, or some interesting conversations, yet we are already imagining ourselves going on holidays with our potential partner, sharing meaningful moments, and going through important life milestones together.

We only know a small fraction of our potential partner, and yet, in our heads, we think we already know everything about that person. Lost in our daydreams, we are projecting all the qualities we are looking for into someone we just met a couple of times.

Instead of falling in love with the actual person, we are falling in love with a romantic love story we are imagining in our heads.

One thing is to be disappointed if someone we barely know rejects us, but if we lose the best romantic love story we would have ever been able to experience, we will hurt ourselves.

No overthinking

The more we daydream, the more we have to lose if our romantic relationship doesn’t work out.

Afraid of the huge loss, we begin overthinking, analyzing every single action and every single word of our potential partner. On top we also carefully plan and review all our interactions, being too critical of ourselves whenever things don’t go as planned.

Why is he taking so long to reply?
What is she doing this weekend?
Did I say the right words when we said goodbye?

Instead of falling in love safely, through our overthinking, we make our journey become a rollercoaster, where every high and low depends on how our partner behaves according to the script we have been imagining in our heads.

To fall in love safely, we need to base our expectations only on what our potential partner has done so far, not on what we would like to happen in the future.

So, if things don’t go as planned, instead of despairing over the love of our life rejecting us, we will simply be slightly disappointed that a few good dates with a nice person didn’t turn into something more meaningful.

To prevent daydreaming and overthinking, we also need to manage our expectations when it comes to love in general.

Expectation management

Unlike what romantic movies make us believe, love isn’t everything. It won’t solve all our problems forever and won’t come without effort just because we deserve it.

Nobody will fully understand us, nobody will always say or do what we need to, and no love story will last forever.

Let’s say you meet the love of your life, well, it’s still gonna end. It’s inevitable, whether by the slow pull of a disease, or the shock of loose footing on a hiking trail, whether it be the corrosion of two personalities that reshape each other until they’re incompatible, or maybe the old stranger in a bar who says the things that need to be said, to that person, that night. The point is, happiness always ends. Best case scenario, think about this. Best case is that you die at the same time.

— Rick and Morty

Love, like everything else in life, requires constant work. It requires us to engage in deep introspection, embrace the imperfections of our partner, be both a teacher and a student, and consistently be patient, supportive, and selfless.

Love will inevitably end at one point, irrespective of how much work we put into it. So, while we are falling in love, we should try to remain grounded. We should see the moments when we are falling in love as some of the highlights of our romantic relationship, not as an emotional state we have to maintain sustainably.

By doing so, we can better deal with our pain once love is gone.

Self-love

Love will come and go out of our control, but self-love will always remain if we cultivate it.

The only person we can always rely on is ourselves. So, before selflessly loving someone else, before putting everything into a relationship, we should make sure that we selfishly love ourselves.

We must prioritize our self-love and make sure that everything we do, we do it for our well-being first.

Self-love means understanding what we need to do to feel good in the long term, developing healthy habits and a path to a meaningful life, and sticking to them.

Self-love means taking responsibility for our well-being instead of relying on someone else. It means learning to say no and setting healthy boundaries to prioritize our physical and emotional stability.

Self-love means not being afraid to face discomfort and to address all our problems so that in the future, we will always be thankful for the actions we do in the present.

If we practice self-love, we will fall in love safely because nobody will be able to take away the happiness we have already found within ourselves.

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To fall in love safely, we don’t need to completely give up on love or become emotionless realists.

We must just remember that, like everything in life, love is temporary and subject to circumstances beyond our control. It is a process we must strive for and a journey with no guaranteed destination.

However, if we have the chance to experience love, we must enjoy every second of it because it is a beautiful gift. So that when it is gone, we will be left with a beautiful sadness for the great memories of what was and the strong hope of what can be.

Well yeah, I’m sad, but at the same time, I’m really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It’s like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good, so I guess what I’m feeling is like a beautiful sadness.

— South Park

If we decide to look for love, we need to be brave. Even if we do our best to fall in love safely, it will still be painful every time we fall.

Every no, every breakup, and every disappointment will still hurt because love is beautiful, and we will miss it when it is gone.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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