Love and Vulnerability

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to 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 (Four Loves, 121).

In both The Problem of Pain and The Four Loves we have come across this idea of love changing you. In the Problem of pain Lewis showed us that it is necessary to love someone as they are, but shouldn’t love also try to perfect? To be loved by God is to be letting him perfect us so that we can become something that is more pleasing to him. To some people, this is a turn off. They think they don’t need perfecting and if they do, they will do it themselves. Having someone tell us that they love us, but that there is a part of us they don’t love and want to change, is not an easy thing to accept. They have wounded our pride, our ego. So maybe we are just rejecting love. This brings me to my next point.
There are two aspects of love that we need to remember. Love is both an action and a reaction. It is giving, it is receiving. You can love someone unconditionally, but because you are loving someone when they aren’t deserving of it, that love could change someone. Often, it takes us being vulnerable and accepting and admitting that vulnerability before we can know love. This is the kind of love that Lewis is showing us in the chapter entitled “Charity” in The Four Loves. Love is opening yourself up to another person, being vulnerable, admitting that there are things that could change and allowing that other person to love you gently and show you what you could improve upon.
The exchange then should be like this: Each person must do two things. 1) They must love unconditionally, not hating them because of their faults. 2) They must open themselves up to be changed by someone else. I am not saying that they should open up to a “I am going to change you” attitude, but they should allow the other person to teach them.
Love is a changing thing. It is not static in nature, but shifting. One must accept people and one must open up himself to be changed. In loving people just the way they are, they will be more likely to be receptive to who you are and less likely to want to force change in you. Instead, you will both be able to be open to what the other could teach you.