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I watched a movie recently that left me staring at the ceiling long after the credits rolled. The main character faced an impossible choice: fall in love with someone knowing the relationship would end far too soon, or walk away and never experience that love at all.

It’s the kind of question that feels almost cruel in its simplicity. Choose love and choose pain. Or choose protection and choose emptiness.

Which would you pick?

The Case for Walking Away

Let’s be honest—there’s a certain logic to protecting yourself. If you know heartbreak is coming, why not sidestep it entirely? We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid pain. We take vitamins, we wear seatbelts, we save for rainy days. We’re hardwired to seek safety, to minimize risk. Why should love be any different?

The pain of losing someone you love is not abstract or philosophical. It’s physical. It lives in your chest. It wakes you up at 3 AM. It turns songs into landmines and ordinary places into memorials. Knowing all of this in advance, wouldn’t it be wiser to simply… not?

There’s no shame in that choice. Self-preservation is not cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is acknowledge our limits and choose differently.

The Case for Loving Anyway

And yet.

We adopt puppies knowing they’ll likely leave us within fifteen years. We plant gardens in the fall knowing winter will come. We have children who will grow up and leave home. We make friends, fully aware that life might take us to different cities, different countries, different versions of ourselves.

We do all of this because somewhere deep down, we understand something fundamental: the value of an experience is not measured only by its duration.

When I think about the people and animals I’ve loved and lost, yes, there’s grief. But that grief exists because something extraordinary happened first. The pain is proof that it mattered. That they mattered. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade away a single moment to avoid the sadness that came after.

Love—real, deep, transformative love—changes who we are. It teaches us patience we didn’t know we had. It shows us beauty we couldn’t see before. It cracks us open in ways that make us more human, more alive, more capable of connection. Even brief love can reverberate through an entire lifetime, informing how we see ourselves and how we move through the world.

What We Gain and What We Lose

Here’s what gets me: in choosing to avoid the pain of loss, we also choose to avoid everything that comes before it. Every inside joke. Every comfortable silence. Every moment of being truly seen by another person. Every ordinary Tuesday that becomes extraordinary simply because you’re sharing it with someone you love.

We don’t just lose the ending—we lose the whole story.

But choosing love knowing it will end requires something from us too. It demands presence. When you know time is limited, you can’t sleepwalk through it. You have to show up. You have to notice. You have to let it matter, fully and without reservation, even knowing what’s coming.

That kind of vulnerability is terrifying. It means loving with your eyes open, without the comforting illusion that this will last forever. It means feeling everything more intensely because you’re aware of its temporary nature.

Is that burden worth it? Or is it actually a gift—the gift of truly appreciating something while you have it?

The Question Beneath the Question

Maybe what this hypothetical is really asking us is: what do we believe about life itself?

Because the truth is, we’re all in this situation already. None of us know how long we have with anyone. The person you love most in the world could be gone tomorrow. You could be gone tomorrow. Every relationship we have comes with an expiration date—we just don’t know when it is.

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether we’d choose love knowing we’d lose it. We’re already choosing that every single day. The question is whether we’re choosing it consciously, whether we’re loving as bravely and fully as we can, or whether we’re holding back, trying to protect ourselves from an inevitable pain that our protection won’t actually prevent.

My Answer

I know what I’d choose. I’d choose the love. Every time.

Not because I’m particularly brave or because I handle grief well (I don’t). But because I’ve learned that a life lived trying to avoid pain is still painful—it’s just a different kind of pain. The pain of absence. The pain of “what if.” The pain of keeping yourself small and safe and perpetually alone.

I’d rather ache from loving than ache from never having loved at all.

But here’s the thing—I don’t think there’s a wrong answer to this question. Maybe you’re in a season of life where you need to protect your heart. Maybe you’ve experienced so much loss already that you genuinely can’t take on more. Maybe your journey requires different lessons than mine does.

Both choices are valid. Both are deeply human.

Your Turn

So I’ll ask you: if you knew love wouldn’t last, would you choose it anyway?

Would you buy the puppy? Plant the garden? Let yourself fall?

Or would you walk away, sparing yourself the inevitable ending, even if it meant missing the beginning too?

There’s no right answer. But I think how we answer tells us something important about who we are and what we value. About whether we believe love is something we earn and keep, or something we experience and honor. About whether we see life as something to win or something to feel.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What would you choose, and why?