“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, Ch. 6

To love, again, is to risk loss, again.

This what the astute observation from C.S. Lewis reminds us. It is a risk either way, though.

We either choose to retreat from the world and risk a hardened heart, OR we refuse to allow our losses dictate a loveless future.

I remember being raw from my divorce and all the betrayals. The hardest part was all the “friends” who betrayed me.

I wanted a “decoder ring” that would magically tell me who was safe. Sadly, I am pretty sure such “rings” don’t exist. (If you find a “decoder ring,” please let me in on where you found it.)

Sadly, the best I could do was learn to take reasonable risks and watch people’s behavior over time. These things taught me who I could trust.

Romantically, I knew I had to first restore my relationship with myself. In other words, I had to come to the place where I liked myself. This would help protect me against settling. It also protected me from the vulnerability and dysfunction of needing another’s validation.

Also, I had to have “deal breakers”–i.e. things I wouldn’t tolerate in a dating relationship. I learned from my first marriage that I needed to avoid people incapable of being alone–i.e. not in a romantic relationship. It never occurred to me in my youth that such is a red flag.

The path forward was not always a straight line. I made mistakes, and when I found Mrs. DM, I had my moments of trauma transference that almost derailed our relationship. That said, I am glad I took the risk to trust and love, again.