It's never the right time if it's the wrong person.

No matter how many times we get hurt by love, we still crave it, and those who act like they don't are just wounded and frightened of being hurt again.

But she just couldn’t stop checking her phone; she wantedto stop, tried to stop, but the pull would not let her go. It wasa strange experience for her to be doing the obsessive phone-checkingthing. Vanessa talked about it, and she had heard storiesabout it from other friends. One date with a guy and suddenlythe phone becomes like an appendage endowed with some superpower to predict your future.

The rest of the short walk was silent. It was that loud sortof silence where the absence is painful, when there’s so much tosay, but nothing is said.

Maybe my fear wasn’t that he couldn’t sustain emotional intimacy, but that he could. Maybe the scariest relationships were the ones where both people wanted to be close.

I rested my chin on my paws, wondering if she’d ever be able to open her heart to another man-human. I knew firsthand how hard it was to try again, to let yourself be loved by someone who could love you back after you’d been hurt. And I knew sometimes when someone said mean things if you were sensitive you couldn’t shake it no matter how much you knew it wasn’t the truth.

When someone shares their distress or their inadequacies, the natural inclination is to comfort them. To mollify. When we do this we brush over their emotions, often because they make us uncomfortable. Most times, people don’t want a blanket. They want someone who is willing to stand outside and shiver with them in the cold.

Maybe it’s better to be with someone you don’t love too much. Someone you love just enough, but not so much that it could destroy you.

Sometimes the truth isn’t obvious; sometimes it exists in the silence, in the emptiness between the spaces, but we’re too afraid to hear it.