Co-authored by Mark Shelvock and Dr. Phyllis Kosminsky.
Nothing is riskier than love, yet we are often taught to imagine love as gentle and benign. In popular culture, love is often framed as something that soothes us, completes us, or protects us from pain.
Yet, this version of love leaves out something essential. Love, from the beginning, was never meant to be risk-free.
To love someone is to offer your most tender, most unarmoured and vulnerable self, without any assurance that this offering will be met. Even when love is met, another risk immediately follows: the risk of loss. So, why do we do it?
Why We Love
We love because we have no choice. We are deeply relational beings before we are anything else.
Connection is not a preference or a personality trait; it is a biological, social, and psychological imperative. Being held within a human web of connection is what steadies us in a world that can feel too vast, too unpredictable, and too much to face alone.
From the moment we take our first breath, we are all instinct and sensation. Our emerging psyches and nervous systems scan the world around us, asking ancient questions:
Who is here?
Who is near?
Very quickly, those questions deepen…
Who is safe?
Who is available?
Who will come when I call?
What we learn in these earliest moments does not stay in childhood. It quietly shapes our expectations of others and of ourselves for years to come.
Attachment theory and developmental psychology give language to this truth, reminding us that love is first learned in the body and the unconscious, long before it is understood by the conscious mind. Early relational patterns become internal maps, guiding how we seek closeness, respond to distance, and make sense of love across the lifespan.
Where the Story Begins
Our story begins with our entry into the world. We need others because we would not survive without their attention and care.
Babies are profoundly dependent beings. When an infant cries, the message is not “I’m uncomfortable” or “could you please consider feeding me”. It is much simpler, and far more urgent.
Babies communicate loudly, clearly, and with a kind of primordial intensity that can overwhelm the parental nervous system:
Come here or I will die.
Does This Feeling Ever Change?
Yes and no.
Adult grief, heartbreak, or relational abandonment can feel very similar to the panic of an infant. The context changes, but the primordial feeling remains familiar.
Whenever connection is threatened, something ancient stirs in the human psyche. The body remembers, even when the logical adult mind insists, “We should be over it by now.”
Is Love a Choice at All?
Again, yes and no.
Decades of attachment research suggest that our earliest experiences of being cared for leave a lasting imprint on how we approach intimacy. This isn’t destiny, but it is a deeply formative and powerful template. We learn, often without words, what closeness feels like, what it costs, and what we can reasonably expect when we reveal our needs.
As children, we are constantly asking (unconsciously and instinctually):
Is it safe to need?
Is it worth showing what I feel?
When I reach out, will someone reach back?
The answers we received as children shape our expectations long before we begin choosing romantic partners. If we have experienced care, we look for a caring partner. If we have experienced emotional resonance, we look for someone with whom we can re-experience this connection. If we have grown up in an emotional desert, this may be what we expect to find, and ultimately, what we do find.
Attachment orientation emerges from lived, often unconscious, early relational experiences.
Is Love Risky?
Love is risky, yes, but so is an absence of love. We look to connect because without connection the world is not only too big, but too cold. Isolation makes the world uninhabitable.
Without relationship, life becomes a harsh and exposed terrain, where the wind cuts deeper, the ground offers no rest, and the weight of living is too heavy to carry alone.
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The warmth of others is what makes us willing to go into the world, to face whatever the world has in store for us, knowing that we can return to the shelter of others.
There is an old Irish saying:
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.
In the shelter of each other, people live.
It is not just sentimental; it is survival and embodied wisdom. A people shaped by famine, exile, and endurance did not imagine life as an individual triumph, but as a shared act of holding and being held.
Attachment theory, in its own modern language, tells this same ancient truth: that safety is relational; that courage grows in the presence of reliable others and secure attachments; that love is not the opposite of risk, but the shelter that makes risk bearable.
So, love does not promise safety from pain. Instead, love offers something older and more necessary: a place where it can be held.
In the shelter of one another, we learn how to live, and how to survive what we could never survive alone.
This article was co-authored by Mark Shelvock and Dr. Phyllis Kosminsky. Dr. Kosminsky is a clinical social worker who has been practicing for over 30 years and has numerous publications in the clinical literature. She is the co-author of Attachment Informed Grief Therapy. Both Mark and Phyllis specialize in providing attachment-informed grief and trauma-responsive psychotherapy.