There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

The quotation argues that genuine love and deep feeling are inseparable from vulnerability: to care intensely is to expose oneself to the possibility of profound pain. Rather than treating that exposure as a mistake to be avoided, the speaker frames it as an ethical obligation—“a duty”—suggesting that emotional self-protection diminishes the very reality of love. The final clause (“without defense or reserve”) rejects guardedness and emotional hedging, implying that partial commitment produces partial living. In this view, the risk of “crippling hurt” is not incidental but constitutive: the capacity to be wounded is the price—and proof—of authentic attachment and fully felt experience.