Name: Why Successful Love Requires Vulnerability
Uploaded: 2026-01-02T07:29:34.000Z
Duration: 6 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

We cannot be good lovers if we don't know how to be vulnerable.

Reflexive pronouns

We make ourselves psychologically vulnerable whenever we let a partner know some of the ways in which we're weak, needy, scared, immature, incompetent or just plain odd, that is, some of the ways in which we're human.

To be vulnerable is to dare to take off the usual cloak of normality and sensibleness with which we navigate the world.

And for once, to show someone who we really are with all the fragility and unusualness implied.

We might, as vulnerable people, admit to a desire to be mummied or daddied, to curl into a ball, to cry over a so called small thing, to be reassured about an apparently minor flaw, to call up Our lover every 10 minutes, to suffer from anxiety or paranoia, to speak in a regressive voice or hug a favorite stuffed animal.

It's a hugely complicated step to confess in front of someone we fundamentally want to impress and secure the affection of that there are basic ways in which we fall short of what a proper adult is meant to be like.

A certain kind of no nonsense partner might well tell us sternly to grow up, complain about us to their friends and make hasty moves to end a relationship.

As a result, we often lie in love, not for advantage or thievery, but

in order to hold on to a love that we desperately depend on.

An uncomplaining, breezy competence and unemotive intelligence can make us an ideal employee, an admirable committee member and a thoroughly respectable citizen of the modern world.

But in an intimate relationship, this form of caution is fatal.

Our fears and inadequacies don't vanish because we've hidden them.

We don't get any less childlike or odd because we've learned to seem sensible.

We simply end up living with someone who cannot know us and who, because they are likely to take their lead from our own reserve, will not be able to show themselves to us in turn.

We enclose ourselves in a prison of mutual deception.

To dare to be vulnerable involves a faith that whatever we are inwardly most afraid and ashamed of in our own natures must have counterparts in other people.

The only people we could assume are normal are those we don't yet know very well.

But once we are past their flawless exteriors, every other person we meet and and especially the person we're now dating will have their share of follies.

They will suck their thumbs, be scared of ghosts, have psychological compulsions or worry about the size of their ears or the state of their friendships.

To be vulnerable is in essence, to let a partner catch a sight of us.

That dates back to childhood, the distant time when we feared that Mummy would never come back.

When Daddy shouted at us and we were frozen with terror.

When a rough friend told us we were a baby for still loving our stuffed elephant.

When no one wanted to play with us in the schoolyard.

When we tried and tried to explain and Granny was still angry.

To be properly, fully vulnerable is to take the other person into the frightened small places of our past and to let them see that we are still, in significant ways, the little distressed person we once were.

Honest, vibrant love is an encounter between two vulnerable children who otherwise do a very good job of masquerading as adults.

What makes people reject the offer of vulnerability, the strength they display, is an indicator of how punishing they've had to be towards their own fragile inner selves.

It's a measure of how fast they had to grow up.

If Mummy dismissed their nighttime fears, they'll have had to try to tell themselves desperately that Mummy was right and that crybabies really are disgusting.

They perhaps deflected the rough boy's taunting of Minko, who Granny knitted while they were still in the womb and whose trunk had half disintegrated under the intensity of their hugs by throwing the little soft toy in the bin.

They managed their traumas by siding with those who hurt them.

They focused on keeping their room tidy, passing exams and learning how to do business.

And so they came to fear the very thing that they now most need and an enfolding, restorative and profoundly understanding tenderness towards their traumatized early selves.

In a grim paradox, to have words of empathy whisper to them lovingly in the dark only reinforces their deepest fears.

Their protective shell snaps ever more tightly shut at the approach of sympathetic love.

They respond to their own needs with panic and self disgust.

We learn to be vulnerable by understanding that those who conveyed the imperative of a tougher, less non crying, non fragile self were profoundly incorrect and in their way, probably deeply traumatized themselves.

Mummy was dismissive of our fears not because she was impressively astute in her theories of human development, but

because she was struggling with her own history of unattended need.

The anti Minko friend wasn't showing us the real path to being a grown up they were inflicting on us some of the unkindness that was in other contexts probably being directed towards them.

We need to go back and convince ourselves, perhaps with a touch of anger, of how misguided our agents of growing up really were.

Finding a partner with whom we can be vulnerable constitutes a supreme act of restoration.

After a lifetime of denial and full strength, we stand to find in another person the sympathy that was sorely needed but unavailable to us in the past.

We become stronger by learning to speak the language of weakness.

By letting our hurt, babyish selves into a relationship, we open the way to a more nuanced, fruitful, creative, and

accurate idea of what it really means to be an adult.