Second chances

I am not the sort of person who finds it easy to trust a second time. When a person receives my confidences with silence, anger, or advice for the future, if they do not give me the respect I feel I deserve, or fail to miss me after an absence, I retreat. I put some armour between me and them in fear of a second occurrence, thinking it safest to isolate myself. In a place of isolation, it's true, there's no risk of being hurt by loved ones, ignored, offended, injured. But there's also no opportunity for snickering with a friend at a joke only the two of you understand, of witnessing the demonstrative nature of selfless love after having to phone them at 3 am when it's all gone pear-shaped.
And anyway. If we cut a person off after one mistake, we lose all of the future moments of them telling us exactly what we need to hear. How many people respond exactly right to the words 'I love you', when spoken for the first time? Probably not many. But if we all isolated ourselves after that first suprised 'What?', we would miss the thousands or millions of times that they make up for it by speaking those same three words tenderly back. Personally, I wouldn't exchange those moments for anything.