Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender - not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

Nobody has any security in loving me.

We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.

Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.

Sometimes you're afraid to fall in love with a chick, but she sucks you in anyway.

Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.

Falling in love, romance, matters of the heart - when you fall in love, on some biochemical level you know there is a chance it won't work out. It's ingrained in us that if you take such an enormous risk on someone with your heart that it might not pay off. I gamble all my chips and I might actually lose everything.

Knowing what I know of love, I hang back because I don't like to lie to myself.

You want to fall in love with a shoe, go ahead. A shoe can't love you back, but, on the other hand, a shoe can't hurt you too deeply either. And there are so many nice-looking shoes.

There is that awful moment when you realize that you're falling in love. That should be the most joyful moment, and actually it's not. It's always a moment that's full of fear because you know, as night follows day, the joy is going to rapidly be followed by some pain or other. All the angst of a relationship.

I've never fallen in love right off the bat. I get scared to say I love you too soon because it means so much. It means you're not seeing an end to things.

I've always thrown myself into love in a rather carefree way, and the net result is that you do get hurt. But I wouldn't take away any of the experiences of my life.

What do you fear, most of all? The possibility that love may not be enough.

I love you, I thought. But I didn't say it. It was not that I feared she would laugh in my face. She was far too kind for that. My fear was a greater one - that she won't say it back.

I almost can’t believe I’m going to make myself vulnerable to him again. But what is love but the most extreme and exquisite form of risk perception? I know that relationships don’t last. And yet, with him, the risk of not being with him is much worse than any other hurt I can imagine.

It's not the loving that hurts this girl; it's the understanding of it for what it is, that it will never be returned in the same way, that threatens to destroy her. But to unload the words - "I love you" - on an innocent party who didn't ask for it, to reach across the dark space and touch him - it's like the world she knows could end if she dared speak these words, dared make such a move.

To get a woman, you have to be willing to risk losing her.

When you're in love, you're so happy that you want to tell people about it. But now I have to censor myself. You need to protect the happiness you have.

People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.

You can live your life being scared of losing someone, and at the end of the day, if he is going to leave you, he'll leave you, and that's it.

Everybody is vulnerable to being in relationships where they get fooled. I'm no different. It's just human nature.

There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

I suppose I'd always been attracted to commitment-phobes because some part of me felt unlovable. It was a lot easier to fall for a guy who I knew, on some level, wouldn't fall in love with me. There was nothing to risk. The real risk would be to finally be vulnerable to love.