Dancing with Brokenness — The Cost of Love.
The fake cactus on my windowsill is easy to love. It’s pretty to look at, but most importantly I know it will never hurt me…
Better yet, it doesn’t need anything from me except the occasional dusting. It won’t gossip, build me up only to let me down, get jealous, or hide its beauty. It’s safe. It’s simple. It’s unthreatening.
And that’s the problem. As C.S. Lewis states, the possibility of being let down is the price of loving another person. Whether romantic or not, intimacy with other people always carries risk. We all carry baggage; in our defense against shame we can be self-seeking, defensive, and imperfect.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable”
—opening ourselves to the real possibility of being hurt by the people we choose to do life with. Miscommunication, self-interest, and shame are common causes of relationship breakdowns.
Today I was reminded that sacrificial love means accepting that you will be hurt and choosing to lead with forgiveness anyway. As Henri Nouwen writes, “the hard truth is that all people love poorly… to be forgiven and to forgive is the great work of love among the complexity of doing life with that weakness of the human family.”
If you were a fly on the wall during my married-couples dance lessons, you’d see the dance floor turned into a kind of colosseum—a dangerous arena where trust is tested, mistakes are made public, and forgiveness is the applause that keeps people coming back. It exposes vulnerability and requires repair. I’ve watched frustrated partners shut down while trying to find trust, rhythm, and timing. Those moments often force a pause in the lesson so the couple can talk through how words or actions affected the other person. The dance floor is a safe place to experience these micro-fractures and to explore the wounds that ultimately lead to healing.
Grace and forgiveness are offered; boundaries are set; and both partners begin to understand their own insecurities and blind spots. They learn how to pursue one another and love better.
Love, at the end of the day, is not primarily an emotion but an action. That’s why it can be commanded. Biblical love, as Tony Evans puts it, is the decision to compassionately, righteously, and sacrificially seek the well-being of another person. We may not always feel like forgiving, but that’s precisely where love is practiced: choosing to love someone regardless of what they can or cannot do for us. It is offering grace in their brokenness while remembering we are equally in need.
Takeaways:
Practice small repairs. A quick apology or a short check-in after a misstep goes a long way.
Use the dance floor as rehearsal. Treat social dances and lessons as low-stakes spaces for trust building.
Hold boundaries and offer grace. Forgiveness doesn’t mean tolerating harm; it means choosing to move forward with wisdom.
Show up again. Love is built by repeated acts of choosing one another.
