Look at any great partnership; not just in romance, but in business, in friendship, in life. You will find two powerful yet seemingly opposing forces at work: one that drives it forward, and one that keeps it from crashing.
We call these love and fear. We’ve been taught to see one as the hero and the other as the villain. One as the path, the other the obstacle. But this is a mistake. To see only the good in love and only the bad in fear is to misunderstand the mechanics of what it means to be human.
Love is the gas. It is the engine. It is the raw, propulsive energy of connection. It is the urge to connect, to build, to be vulnerable and to share an experience.
It is the force that compels you to smile at the lovely stranger, to send a text for no reason other than appreciation, to recognise a bond and to dare to foster it with another.
Without this fuel, the relationship goes nowhere. It sits idle, cold, and silent. Love is the yes.
But a vehicle with only an accelerator is a projectile headed for a literal crash-out. It may have direction but it has no control, no deceleration, no contingency, no way to navigate a sharp corner and no way to stop for an obstacle.
We may love love, but if you believe love is all you need in a relationship, you will burn yourself out in an inglorious, catastrophic crash.
To prevent this, we need fear. The problem is that many of us believe fear is the enemy, and sometimes it is.
Fear that is born from insecurity and control tends to strangle the relationship and chokes out love. Fear can manifest itself in a negative way, but it can also show up as an important warning, a red flag, and a strong discomfort that alerts us that danger is present.
In other words, fear (or caution, if you prefer) is the brake. It is not always there to stop the journey, but is necessary to ensure the journey continues by slowing things down when necessary.
Healthy fear is the respect for the fragility of what you have built. It is the voice that says, “Be careful with your heart.” It is the prudence that encourages you to be faithful, reliable, and trustworthy, not just to a significant other but to yourself.
It is the force that provides the necessary friction to keep you on the road.
The art of a successful relationship, then, is not about eliminating fear and running only on love. That is spiritual bypassing. We are equipped with both positive and negative emotions for a reason. Positive emotions tell us what to continue. Negative emotions tell us what to slow down or potentially stop. The former gets us to where we want to go, the latter gets us there safely.
With this in mind, how can love and fear be operationalised in a relationship?
Use love to propel you through the steep hills of learning how your partner operates, to blaze past distractions of insecurity, and to cruise on open roads of mutual pleasure.
Use fear (or caution) to slow down and look for signs, to check the map to see where you both are, to ask for help, and to maneuver changes in direction or ride through potholes of discomfort.
With this in mind, how can we continue to champion love but agree that fear might actually serve a purpose at least sometimes? Because someone who pursues a relationship solely with love but no fear tends to wreck themselves.
They want someone who will love them, but if this is you, do you find that you tend to get burned by others? Do you find that people fail to match your love? If you were more balanced, you could use fear to stop the dangerous people. That’s what fear was designed to do.
And those who pursue a relationship solely with fear but no love tend to wreck others; emotionally, physically but probably both.
They want someone to gratify them, but it will often be through intimidation and manipulation. This chronic fear is why most people believe fear has no place in a relationship. But like I said, this is chronic fear.
Chronic fear or chronic love must lead to destruction. Chronic love is what causes us to ignore red flags, but chronic fear is what causes us to ignore the green flags. The goal is to keep both love and fear without relying on one or the other. That is what results in chronic overuse of either emotion.
To have a love so motivational it takes you to the stars, and caution so grounded it brings you safely home, that is balance. That is the journey to relationship satisfaction.
Anything you want me to write about? Feel free to share it in a comment.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Meho Mehić on Unsplash
