To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully aound hobbies and little luxuries; and all entanglements; lock it up safe in the coffin of selfishness. But in that casket safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; …The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from love is Hell.

-CS Lewis

*sigh* How true…