Veiled Soul

Men with wounds around receiving love often do not recognise what pure love feels like. So, when they encounter someone pure of heart - who gently nourishes them with kindness and desires to love them in their entirety - it unsettles them deeply. This kind of love feels like a fantasy - something too good to last, to believe in, or to trust - because the love they have known has always been conditional, laced with hidden traps, and fine print that has proved detrimental. As a result, they often mentally prepare themselves to be let down pre-emptively, so they won't be blindsided.

There is a creeping, haunting sense that something will go wrong just as things begin to go right - because that is all their nervous systems have ever known. They live in a subtle state of hypervigilance - always on edge, always quietly questioning the reality they are enveloped by.

Deep down, they feel undeserving of pure love - because, in order to survive, they've had to endure things and make choices they are not proud of - thus, they carry a deeply ingrained sense of shame, a fear that no one could love them if they knew the full version of who they are. So, they veil their souls so thoroughly that they, too, become estranged from their own core. Thus, at times, the instinct to let go of something pure arises - not out of indifference, but from a quiet belief that doing so is the only way to keep the other soul safe, untainted by their darkness. They see themselves as too damaged, too shadowed, to be worthy of something so tender - yet, it is this very kind of love that would nourish their soul, in exactly the way they need.