Love and Insecurity: Coping with the Fear of Rejection
Being Truly Afraid When You Like Someone
What does it feel like to like someone?
Some say it’s joyful, inexplicably making you feel good all the time, like encountering a great thing. Others say it’s bittersweet, making you feel insecure and anxious.
True liking is probably like this, sometimes extremely happy, and sometimes very down.
Before that, our mood was mostly under our control, rarely influenced by others. But afterwards, we easily find ourselves often changing our mood because of someone.
It’s not just that. Once we develop feelings for someone, many of us can feel that we were fearless before, not afraid of anything, but afterwards, it’s like we have a vulnerability.
Instead of always being carefree, we start becoming more fearful.
As the saying goes, the first reaction to liking someone is self-doubt, and behind this self-doubt, there is also unstoppable fear.
Fear that the other person won’t like us.
It has to be said that love is about two people, but liking someone is truly just our own business.
However, even if this liking only concerns our own feelings, each of us still hopes that it’s not unrequited, but rather, that the other person feels the same way.
Because we so hope that our liking will be reciprocated, we worry so much in our hearts that the other person may not have any feelings for us and may not like us at all.
After all, when we like someone, we instinctively see the other person as perfect.
At that time, even if we are also great and outstanding in the eyes of many, we still feel like we’re not good enough for them, thinking that they deserve a better partner, and we are just wishful thinking.
Superficial liking is unrestrained, but deep liking makes us quite restrained.
Although we really want to express our liking to the other person, we always hesitate, wanting to hold their hand, but lacking the courage.
Fear that we won’t get along.
Initially, we fear that the other person won’t like us, but at the same time, even if nothing has happened yet, we start imagining what it would be like for us to be together in the future.
We imagine going shopping together, watching movies together, having meals together, and chatting together.
We fantasize about all this, but then we worry about the conflicts we might face if we really end up together.
When we don’t like someone, we can ignore any unpleasantness between us and not care so much. But for the person we like, even the smallest thing becomes a big deal to us.
This is why we worry so much that we won’t be able to handle these issues, unable to let go of each other in the face of repeated friction, unable to let go of ourselves.
We know ourselves too well. When we don’t love, we are rational, but once we love, we become particularly possessive.
And if one day, we can only end up like that, unable to properly protect this relationship that we finally have, and realizing that we are just not suitable for each other and cannot continue, that kind of situation seems too heartbreaking.
Fear of not having a good outcome.
Life is short, just a few decades, and yet it’s also long, long enough that many partners cannot stay together forever.
When we love someone, we hope that we can go from knowing each other to falling in love, from falling in love to getting married, from getting married to growing old together. But at the same time, we are afraid that in the end, we will still separate.
Over the years, even if we haven’t experienced much, we have already seen too many breakups and reunions.
We even think that loving and then parting ways will only leave both of us injured, and it might be better not to start at all, to keep the best image of the other person in our memories and always cherish it.
People are always like this. The more beautiful something is, the more afraid we are of getting it, and in the end, we just don’t do anything about it.
However, when we do nothing, we won’t see the end of each other, the shattered look of everything, but we also won’t really be able to have, witness, and truly cherish the love between each other.
Not all relationships will have a good ending, but in the end, we have to go through them to know how it will turn out.
In life, when we like someone and only have desires in our eyes, that kind of liking is not real.
But if, when we like someone, we start to lose confidence and feel afraid, then we probably have truly developed feelings.
Being truly afraid when you like someone is normal.
But even so, we don’t have to keep ourselves trapped in place because of fear and not do anything.
Despite the fear, we still need to be a little brave, stop our wild thoughts, gather the courage to approach that person, show our true selves to them, witness the most authentic side of each other, and give our story a continuation.
Perhaps, not every act of bravery will lead to success.
But only when we are brave will we, at some point, welcome the happiness we truly desire.
