Lauren Bowles Quotes

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

We want to be in open, loving communion with each other and our greatest fear is intimacy. That it won't work and we'll be rejected.

Connection and love: We all want it. Most people settle for connection because love's too scary.

The vulnerability of opening your heart fully and deeply to another is terrifying, but at a point in my 50s, I realized that I had to step up to the plate.

If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.

People are so fearful about opening themselves up. All you want to do is to be able to connect with other people. When you connect with other people, you connect with something in yourself. It makes you feel happy. And yet it's so scary - it makes people feel vulnerable and unsafe.

It’s scary telling someone you care about, someone you love who you really are.

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

I think invariably when you are dealing with relationships, the films really center on that, and the plot is really born out of that. That's the most core part of a relationship: intimacy, I think, whether it's expressed or not.

In a relationship you have to open yourself up.

Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It's the magic sauce.

People who find that they have a lot of drama in their relationships need to allow themselves to get 'bored'. At first, it will feel excruciating, and they may find themselves confronting a very real fear underneath all that drama: being truly close and therefore vulnerable to another human being.

Sex isn't hard, but intimacy is terrifying.

It's not like you can wake up and realize, 'Oh, I want intimacy,' and then it happens that day.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

Relationships in general make people a bit nervous. It's about trust. Do I trust you enough to go there?

I don't believe I've ever truly been in love because I don't believe that I've known myself well enough in the past to allow someone to love me.

Love is a vulnerable thing. Falling in love is like a great drug. But then to really be known and really let someone else be known is very vulnerable. It's a weird thing.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.

When I step out on stage in front of thousands of people, I don't feel that I'm being brave. It can take much more courage to express true feelings to one person. [...] In spite of the risks, the courage to be honest and intimate opens the way to self-discovery. It offers what we all want, the promise of love.