There is a definitive risk connected to opening oneself up to intimate relationships. Relationships introduce us to not only the light and bright parts of ourselves, but also to interior parts that are unknown and in the dark. Life serves to introduce us to ourselves. Life brings us lesson after lesson, but currently we are selective lesson choosers because we only want to see what we imagine will confirm the favorable pictures we have of ourselves.
Why do we run away from so many moments in our lives? The short answer is that we run because of the pain we encounter. We want to get as close as possible to what we like finding out about ourselves, but we have no interest in getting close to what seems to cause us pain. As we repeatedly resist painful moments, which are intended to reveal to us our nature, we run through a series of cycles in which we change everything around us, only to end up back where we started as the same human being still wrestling with the same problem.