Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.

Love is risk. Love is letting someone close enough to hurt you, because that’s how (s)he can be close enough to love you. Love is being vulnerable by showing your needs, weaknesses and hurts, while also celebrating together in every victory, blessing and strength. Love is letting intimacy grow in the same measure as the mutual trust, and letting that process at certain point be protected by the wings of covenant. And as my favorite poet says: “Love is the constant rotation of vulnerability, because no one can be strong forever.” It’s better to have a heart full of healed scars as a reminder of the brave choices you took to open up, than a heart cold and untouched behind thick walls of self-protection. Love is risk. But those willing to take the greatest risks are often the ones who find the biggest treasures.

Probably to a fault in my own personal relationships I’ve struggled with this overpowering compassion. Just last night I was talking with a friend about an ex-partner who I was with for five years, and then when we broke up I spent two years trying to make it work as a friendship. People told me to let it go, that it was too painful, it wasn’t normal—but to me it felt so profoundly sad that I would completely detach from this person who I had this intense, wonderful relationship with, who knew me so well and who I shared such compassion with even if there were things about our relationship that became wrong or difficult. I witnessed that with my parents’ friendship: when they broke up they had to overcome terrible things between them, but they put those things aside to raise us—at least, they put those things aside in a way that made those things not our responsibility. I grew up with that forgiving compassion around me, and for me, that’s the real struggle, however passionate or hurt we feel. There’s this panic to make it okay, to make the person happy, to be forgiven.