Emotional Defence

Through a series of events and encounters that I went through in the last few months I realised that there is a certain trait present in some of us that I like to call 'Emotional Defence'. It is not a very creative name so I assume you can already guess what it means. In most people, a seed of caution has been planted at some point in their life when they were emotionally scarred one way or another. In most cases these wounds originated from some emotional disaster that some people call love. Why do I call love an emotional disaster? Because it seems that these days people can only fall in love if there is some risk, pain or uncertainty accompanying the relationship with their partner. If none of this is present, people tend to call it boring and too easy. Hence, this leads to a deduction that to keep someone you care about interested in you, you have to go out of your way to make their life difficult, not much, but just enough so they have something to worry about. So people that are not like this by nature, have to come up with some way to make the relationship risky so they can prevent the other person from losing interest. The usual action people take when a situation like this arises is to hide or dampen their feelings so that their partner does not realise the level of their emotions, which by some magic will re-establish the partner's interest. So basically you are pretending not to care about someone, while caring immensely, so you can get the other person that doesn't care about you normally to fall in love with you because they think that you don't care about them and this will all be like some Sunday night chick flick that they can later boast (or mourn) about to their even more emotionally immature friends. That ladies and gentlemen is emotional defence, it sounds really complicated but we all did it at some point; some still do.
I don't consider myself a relationship expert, far from it. I had some ridiculous relationships in my lifetime and their degeneration was induced solely by my inability to recognise that a) I was afraid that I will go back to my pathetic single life that involves meaningless flings, bad hangovers and even worse self-esteem issues; and b) that I was so afraid to get hurt that I would rather develop a personality suiting more to my partner than to myself and eventually forget who I really was.
But then I went through a metamorphosis, realising that things are going to happen the way they are meant to irrespectively of what I did. All those relationships would have ended anyway, because these people didn't accept who I am nor what I do. This is no 3 hour tissue wasting romantic movie. Relationships are about respect, about accepting the other persons flaws and doing what's best for both. I found the best measure of compatibility with someone is whether or not you can behave around them as you would if you were around your closest friends. If they don't like it, the best thing to do is to just walk away.
I felt these things need to be said, not because I am some bitter, relationship deprived male (on the contrary) but because I have seen too many good people around me suffer because they were afraid to let go, or they had the bad luck of encountering people that told them 'I'm sorry you are too nice for me' and then they ended up blaming their wonderful souls for the end instead of realising they were with someone whose mindset is still at the nappy-wearing age.
But the whole 'You're too nice for me' quote is a topic for a completely different story.