The feeling of disdain is widespread for those who are said to be behind the smiles, afraid of intimacy.
Why on earth be scared of something so obviously delightful and profound as a relationship?
Why take fright at an unambiguous good?
We speak of such types with pity and sorrow and can count on ready sympathy for narrating the story of the end of a relationship that seemed to founder on their caution.
The problem feels as withholding as being afraid of dancing or as cowardly as running away from a moth.
But to anyone who has come close to love, who has been deeply invested in someone and then had to watch the scaffolding of their existence fall apart, there is nothing at all surprising or even momentarily worthy of contempt in the idea of being very scared indeed at love's approach.
Why not be really quite afraid or even frankly terror-struck?
The only people who can speak lightly of a fear of intimacy are ultimately those who haven't had to pay the true price for intimacy, those blessed, blithe, or reserved people who, by luck or discernment, have always been treated gently by those they adored or who have kept themselves protected from intensity or carefully and cannily chosen people they could bear to lose.
But those who aren't afraid of love haven't magically exceeded to a superior degree of wisdom.
They may simply never have met anyone they profoundly cared about.
