Silence CAN be golden!

“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 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

Is love easy? Wow, isn’t that a question for the record books!? I could say so many things about it, but no matter what I said, those words would never describe it’s true meaning or what it can be. Love is the absolute hardest thing that anyone can feel, yet the most amazingly simple thing. It is painful, full of hardships and sacrifice, it hurts a lot; yet somehow it manages to be the most satisfying and thrilling thing that any two persons will ever experience. And how is this so? Because it is LOVE, and that is what everyone longs for.

Why are we so willing to risk the heartbreak and the pain for something we’re sometimes not even sure about ourselves? It’s because we’re seeking something greater and more beyond what we could ever possibly imagine. Love is the fulfillment of everything that we are, what we want to be, what we do and what we believe. Because of this, we’re willing to risk everything that we have in order to give and receive it. But sometimes, we can let our hearts get carried away and fall too hard, too fast. This is where something called “emotional modesty” comes in.

Emotional modesty is something that I didn’t even know existed until about a year ago. I kinda had an idea about it, but I didn’t actually know that there was a name for it, or that it was just as important as physical modesty. I learned about the basics of emotional modesty when I took a class on the Theology of the Body, and then I was able to put a name to it during a Q&A session this past summer.

It’s actually one of the most useful things I’ve ever heard of. It banks off of the idea of Proverbs 4:23, “With closest custody, guard your heart; for in it are the sources of life.” All of us, men and women alike, need to learn how to protect ourselves from falling for “that special someone” overnight. Love at first sight? I don’t quite agree with that. Sure, infatuation can happen in an instant, but are you willing to believe that a man can look at a woman (or vice versa) and instantly be willing to sacrifice his entire life for someone he doesn’t know? Now THAT would be impressive!

See the thing with emotional modesty is that it’s meant to help us, so that we don’t get our hearts broken every week. Do you remember that first crush you had in middle school or junior high? You would always bump into your crush and try to find little excuses to go near or look at him. But at one point, you suddenly realized that he didn’t like you back, and boy, did that hurt! But it wasn’t so bad, because you were little and you recovered quickly. But as you get older, it gets harder to recover quickly, and you’re heart starts to invest too deeply to take everything back so easily. And that’s when we open ourselves up for heartbreak.

The most crucial thing to remember about protecting your heart is that you don’t have to share every little thing about yourself with someone. There’s a difference in sharing everything with your bestie, but when you start opening your heart up and sharing more than your life story with a guy (or girl, if you’re a guy reading this), even if you’re dating, it gets dangerous. You’re investing yourselves in each other emotionally, and too much self-disclosure can hurt a relationship that’s in the beginning stages.

Mother Teresa said, “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only love.” We want to love each other until it hurts, but we DON’T want to hurt ourselves so that we can’t love.