Is it Plato the philosopher who once said love is a form of madness? You can list every reason you’re drawn to someone; gentle, kindness, eyes that sparkle like the stars; but those traits aren’t rare. They could belong to anyone. So why this person, why this moment in time? We rarely have a neat answer. Instead, we feel a rush in our chest, a pull toward one soul that defies explanation. And to me that’s the madness.

I’ve spent too many nights trying to love cautiously. “Guard your heart,” they say, as if the heart were a treasure kept in a vault, safe from thieves. In theory, it sounds wise, protect what you cherish. But in practice, my heart never learned to lock its doors. When I love, I share secrets I haven’t fully processed myself. I throw open windows to watch the breeze scatter the papers of my life. It’s messy, it’s unplanned. And, in a way, it’s the most honest thing I know.

Yes, it’s madness, but it’s the only madness that makes me feel truly alive. When I stand on the edge of that emotional cliff, one foot hovering over the drop, my body shakes with what-ifs: What if I get hurt again? Or What if I’m too much for them? But there’s another question beneath that terror: What if I hold back so tightly I never discover what we could be? That, to me, is a worse fate to stay safe and never see how bright love can glow.

So I give in to the riptide. I let my heart break its own rules because it’s who I am: a person who leaps first, who loves with an unsteady, all-in fervour. If that makes me reckless, so be it. When I try to love in moderation, it’s like painting with greyscale when my whole soul is screaming for neon colour. Restrained love feels like I’m damming a river eventually, the water has to go somewhere, and the pressure only builds.

I once heard someone call half-love a slow suffocation. You tell yourself it’s safer to hide the messy parts, the embarrassing hopes, the jagged regrets. But safer for whom? Living that way, you start to vanish under the persona you’ve invented. You might keep the peace, but in exchange, you lose the sparks that set your heart aflame. If love demands we silence our own voice just to keep the other person comfortable, then we might be sacrificing ourselves to preserve an illusion.

But here’s the paradox, I know my all-or-nothing approach can scare people away. Some see it as naïveté, or worse, desperation. They might wonder why I’m so quick to offer trust, how I can be so candid about my fears. But I’m not desperate. I’m determined. Determined not to waste my life tiptoeing around the possibility of heartbreak. Determined to believe that authenticity no matter how messy will attract those who value it, rather than those who want a neatly packaged version of a partner.

I can’t pretend pain doesn’t exist. I know all too well the reality of hunching over your phone at 2 a.m., eyes dry from tears spent hours ago. I know all too well the reality of reading the last message over and over, looking for some hidden sign that it wasn’t the end. It was. It hurt. And I know all too well that once the ache subsided, I found a strange sense of reverence for what I’d felt, and for how it changed me. Heartbreak doesn’t invalidate love. If anything, it proves how real it was.

We learn from an early age that heartbreak is something to be avoided, as if it’s the worst outcome imaginable. But heartbreak is a by-product of giving your all. It’s the tax you pay for being fully alive in love. I’ve grown more from heartbreak than from guarded half-relationships. Every scar on my heart has taught me another layer of compassion, both for myself and for others who carry their own battle wounds.

Maybe this is why caution never felt right to me. It’s not that I dismiss boundaries or self-care. But caution can morph into self-erasure when you let fear overshadow genuine connection. I tried to keep a ledger once of risks, of ways to protect myself but every time I tried to keep score, love lost its spark. It became a negotiation, not a celebration. I would rather be a bit bruised, a bit undone, than remain so carefully shielded that I never collide with the raw force of another person’s truth.

They call love a madness for a reason: it defies logic. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen the heartbreak. The next time you catch a glimpse of someone who lights up your insides, reason takes a step back and makes room for the heart’s wild leap. That might mean handing over your secrets too soon or whispering “I love you” before the other person is ready to hear it. It’s a risk. But I’d choose the free fall over never jumping at all.

I will forever admire those who’ve perfected their emotional boundaries. Their hearts are well-fortified, perhaps calmer than mine. But their caution often feels like a language I can’t speak. I trip over it like an unfamiliar word. I’m more fluent in the vocabulary of confession: “I’m scared,” “I need you,” “I want this,” spoken out loud even when it trembles on my tongue.

So I choose this madness. I choose to believe that every time I’ve been broken open, I’ve grown larger inside. I choose to trust that the capacity to love without guarantee is not weakness, but the greatest strength we possess. When my heart races with the urge to share a truth, to reach out across the void, to offer connection I let it. I let it because I’ve learned that regret lives not in the moments we risked too much, but in the moments we held back out of fear.

This is my testimony: that love and faith are one and the same. Both require us to step beyond the boundaries of what we can prove, what we can predict, what we can control. Both ask us to believe in something larger than our fears. And both, when embraced fully, transform us into something more than we were before.

So yes, let it be called madness or naivety. Let it shatter our complacency and drench our souls in every bruise and bloom. We love because we trust, trust that, in our unguarded offering, we find not just another person but our own truest selves. We trust that even heartbreak can lead to rebirth, and that even the smallest spark of real connection is worth the darkest nights.

So, in the end, I’m done apologising for how hard I love. If that love is madness, then madness is where I belong. I’ll keep the windows wide open, the floodgates raised. I’ll risk the possibility of heartbreak for the chance to know something real, something that reveals every jagged edge of my soul. Because caution is a lifeboat steady, safe, and small, but I’d rather be in the open sea, battered by waves yet thrilled by the horizon.

I’ll take life in its entire raging, luminous spectrum, madness and all. Perhaps the philosopher was right. Perhaps love is a form of madness. But it’s a madness I choose. It’s a madness that makes me feel, truly and utterly, alive. And in a world that often encourages us to numb ourselves, to play it safe, that madness, that glorious, terrifying madness, is the sanest thing I know.
Bonne fête de saint Valentin!