A widely shared essay making the rounds put words to something a lot of young women feel but rarely say out loud: love feels risky, so why not just protect yourself from it?
September 11, 2026
Writer Freya India argues that a culture of broken families, disappearing community, and endless scrolling has taught a generation to treat emotional detachment as a survival skill – better to want less than to be hurt.
It’s a compassionate diagnosis. But it’s also, from a Catholic vantage point, an incomplete one.
The human heart wasn’t built for self-protection; it was built for self-gift. Theology of the Body reminds us that we discover who we are not by guarding ourselves, but by giving ourselves away – fully, freely, and permanently, the way Christ gives himself to the Church.
That’s a terrifying kind of freedom. It’s also the only kind that leads anywhere real.
Detachment isn’t wisdom. It’s grief wearing armor. And the answer isn’t to want less – it’s to want rightly, and to build the virtue and the community that make real, vulnerable, committed love possible again.
When people are formed for guardedness, marriage will always feel like a risk instead of a gift. The Theology of the Body offers a way to unlearn that and to fall in love with the vision of the human person that makes real, lasting love make sense.
Source: Freya India, “Hope for Girls: Resist Emotional Detachment, Believe in Real Love,” Institute for Family Studies, Sept 2, 2026.
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