The biggest mistake I have made in a relationship wasn't saying the wrong thing, picking the wrong person or making the wrong choice. It was convincing myself that fear was a reason not to choose at all.
When I first transferred to the University in the fall of 2025, I had convinced myself that dating in college was a fantasy. I had seen friends move in and out of relationships, trying to navigate long distances — I never saw it work. Love seemed complicated enough for people who had their lives figured out, a demographic I was certain I was not a part of.
As I stumbled into my first creative writing workshop at the University, I looked around nervously. It seemed like a pretty nice group, all smiles and introductions even before the class had begun. One guy was talking about how Christ compelled him to study literature. Another brought up Marxism.
I looked up from my notebook as a girl walked in. Her eyes were a deep brown, her skin tanned golden and tight curls pinned back into a messy bun. She sat down next to me, carefully placing her bag on the floor. I was awkward, I know it, with a sloppy grin and sweaty palms — but she shared a smile with me.
At first, I didn't think much of it, but when I walked into my discussion for a large lecture class that Friday, I saw those same brown eyes twinkling at me. I thought her reciprocated attention was too good to be true — but this time, we walked out of the classroom together.
As the days turned to weeks and the leaves from green to brown, our casual conversations became deeper, replete with unspoken desires. Before long, I found myself looking for her in every room I entered, inventing reasons to spend another hour with her.
But the closer we grew, the more I became aware of what was at stake. I felt like things were moving too fast — we weren't dating but, clearly, we weren't just friends. I had a deep desire to ask her to be my girlfriend, but every version of that question seemed to carry a responsibility I wasn't sure I could fulfill.
How could I, a 20-something-year-old-man with barely any idea of how to navigate a five-minute conversation, filled with anxiety and fear about everything in my past and future, be so arrogant as to take on the responsibility of someone else's heart? How could I promise someone consistency when I still felt uncertain about myself? How could I ask for her trust when I wasn't convinced I was capable of fulfilling it?
It was so difficult for me to push past my fear of commitment — or, maybe more accurately, my fear of failing at it. I had always tried to live my life without that doubt — my dad had always told me that it was better to be hurt in love than to never try. But I let fear win.
So, as the weather turned cold and we talked about what we were, fear took over me — I told her I just wanted to be friends.
We drifted apart after that, never truly fulfilling the word “friends,” lingering instead in a liminal space between friendship and a magnetic force neither of us was willing to name.
After some time passed, we slowly began to see each other more and more. I always went to the Grit in Nau Hall between my classes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and she would come and find me there. But things were always tense — all the things we hadn’t been saying tarried in the air between us. Every conversation was a tightrope walk, unsure of what the other was feeling and nowhere near comfortable enough to ask.
Then one night, after months of this circuitous dance, our paths crossed in an entirely different way. She was working across the street from a bar, and I came by to see her. We heard music nearby and she said she wanted to dance. She bought drinks and as I sat and listened with her, everything I thought I had left behind came flooding to the surface — that same insistent fear intermingled with that same insistent desire.
Deep in our drinks our hands slowly intertwined, and we left the band, walking up Chancellor Street. After we walked a while we sat on an empty patch of grass, close enough that neither of us had to say much — the silence was filled with everything we hadn’t been saying for months.
My insides were churning with a desire to reach out and grab her — to again let the world fade away between us. I remember thinking, very clearly, that I had two choices — keep waiting for some kind of certainty to dawn on me, or accept that if I wanted her I had to take a leap of faith.
At that moment, my dad’s advice came back to me, latent with a meaning I had previously ignored. No matter how much fear I felt and how little I trusted myself to do this right, in that instant, it didn’t matter to me. I was willing to take the risk. I felt the fear, but regardless, I leaned in close.
Slowly, I kissed her, my body tensing as I waited for a flinch or a slap but, to my relief, she didn’t pull away.
Afterward, what surprised me most wasn’t what had changed, but what hadn’t. We had both been doing the same maddening thing for months — waiting, assuming and misreading.
I thought she had moved on, she thought I had never had feelings for her. Really, I had been pining after her for months, though I worked not to show it while we were “friends,” and she had never moved on — still as hung up on me as she had been in fall.
I try to be calm and rational, consider all the possibilities and make a well-thought-out choice. But what I realized — what my experience with her helped me realize — is that most decisions are made out of fear. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Love isn’t always a rational creature. “I’m afraid” does not just encompass a fear of commitment — it means I’m afraid to lose her, afraid to hurt her, afraid that if I care too much I will hurt myself. The lynchpin of all these fears was that I cared enough to will them into existence in the first place. With that being true, I realized that denying my fear — or letting it dictate my actions — would never get me anywhere.
Since I came to this realization, that girl with twinkling brown eyes and I have been so happy together. Though she has changed much since the first time I saw her — new hair, new tattoos — I am still continually struck by her beauty, and the fearless way she carries it. When I look into her deep brown eyes, all of our memories together play in my mind to the rhythm of my father’s words — it is better to love in fear, than to never live at all.
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