What Is It Like to Be a Porcupine in Love?

The Porcupines’ Dilemma

What is it like to be a porcupine in love?

What if you were the sort of creature who is just naturally covered in quills? I mean, you’re just like any other soft, warm-blooded mammal—you want to love and be loved. You want to be able to snuggle and make a scrumptious life together with someone yummy. You can’t help that you are who you are—an adorable, soft-snouted porcupine…covered from nape to tail in painful needles.

How can I hold someone close when I know I’m going to hurt them with my sharp bits?

And, to further complicate matters, being myself a hot-blooded porcupine, I just happen to be mad thirsty for, you know, other porcupines. And do you know what other porcupines have? Quills.

So, if this cute little snuggle-bug porcupine gets close to me, I’m going to inevitably poke them, and if I get close to them, they are going to inevitably poke me—mostly by accident, but still… this is gonna sting.

There will be moments when I’m trying to tell a story about my day and notice my partner scrolling on her phone. Ouch. There will be moments when I try to make a joke about something my partner is saying, and it lands like a tease. Poke. There will be moments when our partners are cranky, irritable, short, and harsh towards us. Ouch. There will be moments when we are cranky, irritable, short, and harsh towards them. Poke.

This is the porcupine’s dilemma…

And, sweetheart, whether you know it or not, you’re a porcupine.

And so’s your partner.

So, this, at the heart of it, is your dilemma, too.

And it’s my dilemma, and your neighbor’s dilemma, and your child’s dilemma. All of us, each and every one, is a porcupine who just wants to love and be loved by other porcupines.

What are we to do?

Well, unfortunately, what we most commonly do is stay as far outside of the quills’ distance as we can stand. We figure out how to get as close to others as possible without risking getting stung. We build our relationships so that they are close but not too close.

In other words, we choose the safety of loneliness over the vulnerability of intimacy.

I am both a relationship scientist and a couples’ therapist, and I’m here to tell you that most of the couples I encounter have settled for the comfort of cold distance over the warmth of a vulnerable connection.

I mean, I get it, believe me. Left to our own devices, who in their right mind would choose to sting and be stung? Intimacy is dangerous.

And not for the faint of heart.

But I’m here to say that intimacy is worth it.

Warm, rich connectedness is our birthright, and in its absence, we cannot help but suffer. We need intimacy to thrive in this world. Moreover, we not only need intimacy, but we are, at the bottom of the bottom, nothing but intimacy itself. We arise from, dwell in, and return to intimacy heartbeat after heartbeat.

This remains true, though we don’t know it, though we turn away from it and armor ourselves against it. All because no one ever taught us how to embrace our vulnerability as the source of our strength and the only path toward reclaiming our inheritance—love and wholeness. Our greatest strength, our most trustworthy resiliency, our fathomless capacity to love and be loved is rooted in embracing our vulnerability—yours and mine, yours and your partner’s, yours and your family’s—together, in wholeness, forever.

And maybe that’s enough for now.

I want to invite us to sit together with this dilemma, to hold it in our hearts, and invite it to guide us into the great mystery that is walking the intimate path.

What is it like to be a porcupine in love?