Fear of Intimacy Quotes

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Those who love to be feared fear to be loved, and they themselves are more afraid than anyone, for whereas other men fear only them, they fear everyone.

Men are terrified of a woman's depth of love and the energy that moves as a woman's sexuality and emotions. And, at the same time, men want nothing more in this life than to merge completely with a woman's devotional love and wild energy. Only as a man outgrows his fear can he handle a woman's tremendous love-energy without running. And only such a man is worthy of your devotional offering in a committed intimacy.

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender - not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will most certainly be wrung and possibly broken ... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

I was always slightly afraid of marriage because I didn't like the idea of being tied down. Even when I met Brian, when I was in my mid-thirties, I didn't actually see it on the cards for us. He was a huge rock star, and our lives were very different.

I see myself being a father, hopefully a husband, but I'm very gun-shy. The older I get, the further the goalpost.

Every woman I've had a relationship with has found this maddening; the fact that I will talk about anything on the stage, and reveal all this stuff, and yet when I'm at home, I clam up and won't discuss anything intimate or personal.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate.

People are more afraid to love than they are to kill.

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

I just am really bad at making new friends - especially in the music industry, because they're not really real friends; they're just music industry friends.

Most human beings still cannot trust love.

Although in my life the level of loss has never reached the extremes it does in 'The Winter People,' I certainly can identify with being both a daughter longing for her mother and being a mother who is almost scared by the intensity of her love for her daughter.

Even though I'm in love, sometimes I get so afraid.

...available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy.

I've been single for so long that I'm scared of being in a relationship.

To fear love is to fear life.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

I've been hurt so many times I don't have the balls for it anymore.

The monsters in my head are scared of love.