When it comes to love, people often tend to promote emotional strength and vulnerability. As a society, we love to promote love. We love to say that we are open and receptive to love.

Underneath all of this, though, are millions and millions of people who are paralyzingly terrified of love. Whether it is falling in love with someone else, someone else falling in love with us, or the notion of love just in general, it scares us.

For some, it is the idea of someone falling in love with us and then ultimately getting hurt when those feelings can't be reciprocated to the same degree.

Sometimes a person's fear of love can even be strong enough to drive them to write-off love completely.

If you fit into any of these categories or any related subcategory, I want to start by saying that there is nothing wrong with you. You are not "damaged goods", you are not broken, and you are not flawed. You are not any less of a person because you are struggling with love.

Love is something which requires vulnerability in order to be fully successful, and vulnerability can certainly be terrifying. Love asks us to be open, receptive, and vulnerable, regardless of the possibility of getting hurt. And that is a scary thing. I think that in general, we hate getting hurt, so the prospect of allowing ourselves to be open to getting hurt is something we don't necessarily like. Especially for those of us who have been taken advantage of in this way in the past, which I'm sure can be said for most people, accepting the vulnerability and being willing to be vulnerable is really tough.

A major part of this, in my opinion, is growing into the mentality that not everyone has bad intentions, and not everyone is going to end up hurting us the way people have in the past. Every situation is different, every person is different, and every relationship is different. Every single one. Though it can be hard to get over the hurt you've experienced, and hard to officially put it in the past and leave it there, it is so important to do this. If we aren't leaving the past in the past, it becomes impossible to continue forward motion. We become stagnant and stuck, and this is not how it should be.

So, when you are dealing with a hurt that someone you love has caused you, allow yourself the time to heal from it and move past it, and in the meantime, acknowledge that it is okay for you to be feeling a little deterred from the love scene.

I think a lot of times, people tend to invalidate their own feelings by comparing themselves to people in their immediate surroundings, or even to society as a whole. People tend to disregard or discredit their own unhappiness, telling themselves that they "shouldn't" feel a certain way. Something that always breaks my heart is when I hear a person vent about the fact that they are not happy, and they end it with "I don't know what's wrong with me". This, to me, implies that that person feels like they're flawed and that their discontented feelings are a result of this flaw, and that genuinely kills me. I cannot stress enough the fact that every single thing you feel is absolutely valid, and nobody can tell you otherwise. It doesn't matter what the people around you are doing. Do not use your environment as a means of discrediting your emotions.

It is okay to be sad, and brokenhearted, and scared. These are common human emotions that every single one of us has felt, or is feeling, or will feel. We are prone to these feelings, and quite frankly I think we are lucky that these are things we are capable of experiencing. Someone dear to me once said that he cherishes the bad times because they make him appreciate the good times even more. He told me that if we didn't have these ups and downs, these fluctuations in the way that we feel, we would probably end up just being numb because we wouldn't have any way of measuring the good. Every single day would feel exactly the same, and our emotions would be at a standstill.

I think he's right. We need the bad days to appreciate the good ones. So, when you find yourself in an emotional rut, remind yourself of this.

Something else that I think plays a huge part in a lot of peoples' fear is self-forgiveness. Sometimes people are afraid of love because they're afraid of hurting that other person, and maybe this stems from a time when this occurred in the past. Unfortunately, it is not always the case that two people fall perfectly in love and both of their feelings are on the same level. Sometimes one person ends up feeling more strongly, and the other person eventually comes to realize that the relationship isn't right. If this is the case, and they decide to end things, certain people do have trouble forgiving themselves for the pain they may have caused. While this is understandable, it is also a part of life, and as much as that other person may be hurting, they are better off continuing the search, because this way they will ultimately end up with the person they truly are supposed to end up with, rather than being stuck in a situation with a person whom, yes, they love, but who doesn't reciprocate those feelings to the same degree.

We need to be able to forgive ourselves for things like this. We need to forgive ourselves for following our hearts, and for breaking the hearts of others, as wild as that might sound. I am a firm believer that everything that is meant to be, will be, and everything that isn't meant to be will eventually cease. Things that aren't supposed to happen, won't. I think we need to trust the universe when we find it within ourselves to do something hard, such as hurting someone by walking away.

By and large, what I really want you to take away from this is that no matter how afraid you are of love, and no matter what reasons may stand behind this fear, it is okay, it is normal, and it is valid.

Remind yourself of this, keep the past in the past, and grow from your experiences.