Should You Look Before You Leap?

Even if that has not happened to you, you’ve probably read a book or two, or perhaps you know someone that this has happened to. A head over heels love at first sight meeting. And it didn’t stop there. Oh no! They did something drastic like getting married while riding elephants at the zoo or running away to Brazil. I know, you’re sighing and thinking “that’s so romantic!”. But is it really?

I flip flop about this one. I’ve been in that situation before. When I was younger, though equally as head strong as I am now, I fell, totally and completely, for a man 15 years older than I. After we dated for just three months, I sublet my totally amazing, really hard to find, apartment, moved in with him and started window shopping the engagement rings.

Everything was going well, for about a month, and then he attacked me. Physically. Though I can talk about it now, at the time my whole world literally fell apart. I felt unloved, I was homeless, and I had no trust in my feelings or instincts. I was a stranger to myself. It was sudden and it was intense.

Should I have been more discerning about what could possibly lie ahead? Perhaps. But seeing as how I did make it out alive, I’m not sure if I would do things any differently if I could go back. Sometimes putting a buffer on happenstances of the heart like this also puts a buffer on the amount of emotion you get to experience.

The reasoning behind leaping before looking is really not very complicated. You can’t have all the good without risking getting some of the bad. And they don’t sacrifice the good for the sake of saving themselves from the potential bad. Doing otherwise could leave you with nothing more than middle ground. Life’s just too short to not risk some extremes from time to time.

Having said that there are two sides to this coin. I’m all about following your heart to unexpected places. You’ll have some amazing adventures. But, and it’s a big but, there’s a big difference between being someone who habitually falls deeply in and out of love and changes his or her whole life around on a whim, and being someone who drops everything for one once in a lifetime whirlwind romance.

Like everything, there are two sides to this debate. Sure, I’m all in favor of following one’s heart, especially if it leads you to some unexpected places away from your chosen path. But there is a world of difference between being someone who has a chance encounter with someone amazing and someone who makes it a habit of thriving on the drama of falling in and out of love.

I suppose some people are happy like this and if so, more power to them. However, there are lots of casualties surrounding someone who lives like this: they have friends and co-workers and lovers and neighbors and pets and a life that gets set up. When you drop everything at the sight of the next “soulmate” who comes along, there are bound to be a heap of people in your wake who are going to feel something missing when you’re gone.

It’s a rare thing full of unspeakable joy when you fall in love hard, fast and intense. You simply have to go for it. And if you’re really lucky, and you’ve had some experience, perhaps you’ll master doing so and keeping the rest of your life intact without having to sacrifice any of love’s intensity.

This article was developed by the staff of the Datepad.com internet dating company where you can read thousands more professional dating articles.