Emotion is a weapon that the weak shrink from. To give unabashedly and lay your heart out on the table is to say: “Here take it” — and if you do so you shall feel the heights of joy, but you shall risk the depths of despair — dare you take it?

Dare you touch something that has so great potential for both destruction and elation or do you run? Do you hide, do you build walls around yourself, and do you shrink from love and slink away, justifying the fact that you know love because you have been burnt by it before? Do you explain to yourself and anyone who will lend an open ear that love is pain, and only strong can resist the pain that love brings.

Only the strong defend themselves from the imminent internal death that giving emotion unabashedly may very well bring, and often does.

Is it possible that those who recite this familiar defense against love are merely pretending they are strong by building emotional walls around themselves? Are they actually weak in disguise?

Bravery is not displayed behind the walls of a fortress, emotional or otherwise.

No knight in shining armor ever hides behind the castle walls claiming he knows all the world of pain.

Who needs love? We’ve got here and now, and that’s enough, right?

It’s beginning to seem as if most of us simply give up hope, the childish concept that is usually cast aside by the age of 25 for the real world, and instead we hide our emotions away deep inside ourselves. We then guard our hidden emotions with witty sayings and justifications about why they are so foul. We convince ourselves thoroughly that love will hurt us, but we are smart: We will out-smart love by never feeling it.

Then one day we accidentally get too close to someone, and as soon as mutual emotions begin to brim near the surface we immediately run.

We steep ourselves in these reasons until we believe them, until their meanings are embedded in us. We forget the reasons but retain their implications, leaving ourselves to simply regard our former love with slight regret and disclaim: Yet the reality behind the failed relationship is that all along we were running from fear lodged deep within ourselves.

So it seems this game of love gives us two options: On one hand we can risk it, we can face love and pain and take them both in stride. We can move forward and let the experiences we accumulate change us and at times force us to grow into bigger, better people.

On the other hand, we can hide; bury all that we have and give deeply inside ourselves and push away all those who dig deeper into us, and live a life that is safe. Living a half-life of hiding and never really feeling the lows.

Are so many people in our cynical society giving up and cashing in the few chips they have? Often settling for the stagnant dull pain of self induced extended solitude as a substitute for the searing pain of love that they fear so.

I sincerely hope not.

It is the brave who feel, it is the brave who can be tormented, shattered, dashed upon the rocks by love. Only to rise from the ashes, rebuild and try to love again. And if this rings true for you, if you have been hurt, burnt by love one time too many, just remember it is only the weak who try to hide from themselves. And in doing so they condemn themselves to a life of purgatory, never loving, but never hurting, never really feeling much of anything, nothing extreme that is. What is life without polarization (divergence?)

This game of life may be rigid, but as with every great happiness if you take it away the pain will feel twice as great, but hide from the game altogether and there is not even a chance of winning.