The Price of Vulnerability 1/7

A Lost Romantic’s Prologue

Maiken Ringkjøbing has always believed in and dreamed of love. She has just found it difficult to dare to pursue it. In this personal story, Maiken Ringkjøbing explores why the fear of getting hurt can outweigh the longing for love. What does it do to a person to protect themselves so much that no one is ever truly allowed to get close?

The Price of Vulnerability is Maiken’s story about love, fear, and a constant escape from losing control. About growing up with the ideal of great love while simultaneously being terrified of it. Through conversations with psychologists, her parents’ love letters, and her own experiences, she investigates why some of us long for love yet still struggle to surrender to it. This is the first part of The Price of Vulnerability by Maiken Ringkjøbing.

Can you become afraid of love from growing up surrounded by too much of it?

There he stood, offering me his whole heart. And even though, at the age of 19, I had spent the past six months sharing my everyday life with him and caring deeply for him, that was exactly why it had to end.

It was February 2018. Our relationship had lasted just long enough for me to start getting bored. Long enough for me to begin looking elsewhere — even though I was devastated at the thought of losing him. I remember it as the worst thing in the world to hurt another person, but also as the greatest relief to be the one doing it. The one who was slightly more loved than loving. The one who had control over the fate of the relationship.

You would think that would change with age. But it has only gotten worse over the years.

Why is it that I, the child of a beautiful love story, find it so difficult to surrender myself to exactly that? To love. Or the idea of it. I can feel things. So why don’t I just do it?

Throughout my childhood and early youth, it was never really something I worried about. I dreamed of a grand love story — my first kiss should be special, and my first time should be with someone I was in love with. And it was special. Just not in the way I had imagined.

Because for some reason, during my high school years, I only ended up in relationships where I had the upper hand.

Do you understand?
The upper hand.

Who the hell talks about their past relationships like that? As if that should somehow be a healthy foundation for an equal and loving relationship. Of course it wasn’t. Because I ended up breaking hearts.

Back then, I didn’t see anything alarming in the way I handled love. But now I’m approaching 27 and still struggling with intimacy and devotion — and it forces me to ask questions. I see it, hear it, and feel it more and more often. In conversations with friends, in song lyrics, and in cinematic storylines.

I grew up in a home filled with a kind of love you usually only see in films. My parents have loved each other for nearly 30 years. They chose each other. They stayed. They laughed and wrote letters, and I have always been able to feel that it was real. Not perfect, but real.

As a child, I learned that love was something beautiful, but also something immense. Something fragile and important that should never be taken lightly. Maybe that was where it began: the expectation that love had to be all or nothing. And the understanding that just as I was supposed to choose someone else, I also had to be chosen — for everything that I am.

Maybe love has become a game. Because can it really be true that I simply love my freedom too much? That I am just picky? That I have impossibly high expectations for a future partner because my parents’ love story shaped me so deeply?

Or is there something deeper within me — and within society, for that matter — that prevents me from truly being able to?

That is what I intend to understand better. And I want you to come along on the journey.