Fearless

“I would rather get hurt than feel nothing at all,” she said. We were sitting at a bar and I had just warned her of the pain of a broken heart. She didn’t seem to care. After a five-year-long relationship and about a year of trial-and-error dating escapades, she encountered something she hadn’t known for a very long time: the intoxication of what could be love.

Rebecca is one of the most practical and rational people I know. She believes in science over religion, in proven facts over intuition. Yet here she was, ready to risk heartbreak, because whatever the outcome, at least she would feel something.

The hopeless romantic I saw before me was a completely different Rebecca. She was talking about a brand new romance that, in a very practical sense, was destined to end. She was getting ready to move hundreds of miles away and she had met this guy only a few weeks prior.

But suddenly Rebecca was a warrior for love. She was ready to risk pain by continuing to see the guy and opening her heart to him. It didn’t matter what the logical outcome might be, because logic is of the mind and love has nothing at all to do with what goes on in your head. If anything, the mind only gets in the way of love. How could there be any romance in the world if we all approached love like it was a science? Being illogical is the only way to have hope for love, period.

It’s funny, the term, “hopeless romantic”—it really is a judgment of romantics to assume that they’re hopeless. To believe in love is to trust in a mysterious force that is nearly impossible to define, but who’s to say that there’s no hope in that?

Rebecca’s going-away party was an occasion for hopeless romantics everywhere to celebrate. She invited her closest girlfriends to her almost-empty condo, so we could toast to how much we adore her and wish her a bon voyage. This was a big move she was making, and an important moment to celebrate. And guess who showed up.

The first person there was The Guy. He could have found a way out, said that it was too intense to meet her close friends all at once or insisted that he didn’t want to make any more moves to get closer when they were about to be so far away from each other. That would have been the safe option, the practical option. But he didn’t. He was present for her.

I’m not going to be so presumptuous as to call this love, because that’s not my place to say, but as a third-party observer, knowing the effect that meeting this person has had on Rebecca, and seeing the way he unabashedly wrapped his arms around her in front of scrutinizing eyes, I would say that whatever does exist between them is real. There’s a reason that Rebecca is no longer rational, that she insists with all her fierceness that she knows what she is doing. It’s impossible to know what will happen in the future, but at least she is jumping in with both feet and giving her heart a chance to feel whatever comes her way. That is fearless, and a far cry from “hopelessly” romantic.

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love walks

a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here senses

the love-hawk floating above

and waits and will not be driven

or scared to safety.

-Rumi