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We cannot be good lovers if we don’t know how to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to take off the usual cloak of normality and sensibleness, and show someone who we really are with all our fragility and unusualness. We might admit to a desire to be mummied or dadied, 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 is 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. We might lie in love not for advantage or thievery, but in order to hold on to a love that we desperately depend on. We pretend to be strong and unafraid, putting on a show of being someone else.
However, in an intimate relationship, this form of caution is fatal. Our fears and inadequacies don’t vanish because we’ve hidden them. 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. We cannot be alone in our oddities.
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 is 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 their favorite stuffed toy by throwing it in the trash can and telling themselves that they were no longer a baby.
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.