Note: this is a repost of an article I wrote on my Quora blog in November 2015.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about strength and vulnerability. Traditionally, strength was seen as a lack of vulnerability—or at least a denial of it—especially for men. Thoughts on this are changing; but, as in many arenas, practice lags behind theory. If I asked my friends if it was acceptable for men to cry, many would say yes; but few of those same people would imagine a man crying if asked to picture emotional strength.
Despite this, the older I’ve grown, the more I feel that vulnerability is not only permissible in the strong, but also inherent in strength itself.
I will never forget my first heartbreak. I was in sixth grade and had harbored a crush for one of my best friends for months. One weekend, on an AIM chat, she told me that my feelings were reciprocated. I walked into school with my head held high, only to find that I had been the victim of a cruel prank. I was crushed—I hurt in ways that I didn’t know were possible—and I wanted to do anything I could to prevent that kind of betrayal again. My capacity to trust and my willingness to expose my heart were severely damaged.
Like I did, most people lose their ability to be vulnerable when they begin to learn the negative consequences of doing so. This loss is often permanent—the instinct to avoid pain is strong, and whatever benefits result from being vulnerable are far less immediately apparent than the costs.
For these reasons, it took me ten years to figure out how much I value vulnerability.
I’d like to be clear; I did not come by this realization by any thought of my own. I was forced into it by crisis.
I was twenty-three and just starting grad school. My girlfriend and I had a tumultuous relationship; I very distinctly remember how we fought. Each argument generally started with something insignificant, but our communication during the argument led to the spawning of new mini-disputes until the conversation spiraled out of control. I loved her deeply and wanted nothing more than to find a way to communicate better. I spent a huge amount of time over the next few months thinking about it, but nothing I tried seemed to work. One day, while angrily thinking about the latest argument, I had a thought: “The only way I could be okay with what she said to me is if I had no pride at all.” All the months of thinking were worth that single moment of clarity—I knew I had to choose between my pride and her. I chose her.
Now, I don’t want you to think that my decision caused a heroic reversal of our fortunes. We did end up breaking up a while later, and a good part of that was due to my very imperfect execution of the lesson I’d learned.
Still, that decision was one of the best I ever made. Giving up pride—essentially a mechanism to avoid vulnerability—strengthened our relationship and helped us experience a greater degree of love than we were capable of before. Even more importantly, it helped me realize how much more any relationship can be when you truly let a person into your life. I learned that in a very deep sense, when you live for love, everything you experience is enriched as a result.
Of course, simply knowing that vulnerability can enhance your life doesn’t make you any less aware of what you already know: that being vulnerable leads to being hurt. It’s not just a possibility—it’s an inevitability—that if you open your heart to people you will eventually feel pain because of it.
This reality makes it all the more impressive when people choose to expose themselves emotionally in search of a stronger connection with someone. This is strength in its purest form—accepting, serenely, the costs in order to pursue something greater than yourself.