I had a good discussion about this with my cousin last night about his being vulnerable in the past and building walls. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is dangerous as being one implies we might get hurt. No one wants to get hurt or to hurt another.
What is intimacy? It's a step towards a possible relationship because a relationship without intimacy is not a relationship. It's what you call "friendship".
With this, we talked about who builds walls more... the men or women. My cousin built walls and I built my own walls too. However, for me, it's the men. As children, girls wail about physical pain and they're allowed to do so while the boys brought up to think it is not manly to show the pain. This caused little boys not talking about their feelings. They grow into men with an emotional vocabulary less developed than that of the women.
Men in general often have trouble naming exactly what they feel and often more vague in describing emotions. I remember an ex-boyfriend who would often be anxious when the whole topic of emotions are being brought up while I was more comfortable talking about almost anything else!
Some men talk about feelings as if they live in fortresses with walls as high as The Great Wall of China! A few were allowed to walk in but these are the ones closest to them. Although they felt safe within the confinements they built, they feel as if there is essentially no one with whom they can truly be themselves... which is really sad. Some men i know including my cousin overcame and break down their own walls because they realized it gets too be too lonely.
So many of us confuse thoughts and feelings. Feelings are words, not explanations. We all live in a time when depression is rampant in our time. Depression isn't always feeling sad. Depression is at times, just feeling numb or very little thus; we build walls which is not good.
Defenses though aren't bad. Without these, we would be vulnerable and some experiences can be very painful. If our shield is always up, we should always think not just with our thoughts but feel our feelings. When we yearn for intimacy, we need to acknowledge our feelings. When something happens, we take a deep look on it for we never know if what we are feeling is actually more than one feeling.
I keep my defenses up all the time but there are instances that I lower them to find out what could actually be because I don't want that one day, I'll forever wonder what could have been, what should have been and what might have been with a particular person or situation. After all, everything is a risk and pain... we just gotta let it ride out or we wouldn't feel human at all!
Life is just way too short to worry about so many things!
Thanks to Vincent Garrucho for my own photos :))