I don’t think anyone is totally ready for love. No one is truly ready for the freedom or the time they have to give up and no one is also entirely ready for the challenges that come with getting to know another person; the fights, the sacrifices, the obstacles and having to adapt to someone else’s habits or accept their differences. It’s not really a piece of cake and no one is completely all in when it comes to giving up certain parts of their life for someone else.

Everybody just wants the attention, the butterflies, the passion and the steamy kisses but no one wants the compromises, the fights, the effort, the hard work you have to put into a relationship to make it work. That’s why people prefer casual dating because they don’t have to promise anything, they don’t have to feel anything so deeply — and when you don’t feel, you don’t get hurt.

But I think there’s a part in each one of us that craves someone to talk to at night, someone who can understand us when we barely even understand ourselves, someone who can brighten up our rainy days. Someone we can lean on when times get rough and someone we can trust with our secrets and with ourselves. We all need someone who knows how to calm down the storms within our hearts and shelter us from the noise of the world and the noise of our own thoughts.

So it’s safe to say that everybody wants love even though they’re not ready for it. It’s safe to say that even if our world is falling apart, some people are worth a shot. They make us want to try. They make us want to be ready.

Because the truth is we are all scared of falling in love and getting hurt, we are all scared of losing someone we love, we are all scared of breaking someone’s heart while trying to mend ours — but if we keep looking for all the reasons why love can be scary or why we’re not ready, we will keep our hearts in a cage forever. If we keep putting up walls and building barriers, we’ll be alone forever.

And the pain of love is a thousand times better than the pain of loneliness.

So maybe we’ll never be ready for love, but that should never stop us from giving someone a chance, opening our hearts up to them and simply allowing ourselves to fall hoping that eventually, someone will be strong enough to catch us.

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.