Packing Light: What Backpacking Teaches Us About Carrying Fear in Relationships
Relationships
Fear overpacks both backpacks and relationships with control, resentment, and armor. Replace them with trust, honesty, and flexible boundaries to lighten the load and walk together more freely.
In backpacking, there’s a saying: You carry your fears.
New hikers pack as if their survival depends on it—two spare jackets, gallons of water, an extra stove—because they’re afraid of getting cold, hungry, or lost. Their packs can swell up to 40 pounds, making every step they take excruciating.
Seasoned hikers learn a different art. They don’t drop their packs; they refine them. They keep what’s essential—layers that work together, gear that serves multiple purposes, enough water until they reach the next source—and let go of what only weighs them down.
The same wisdom applies to love.
Fear Travels with Us
Fear is part of being human. In relationships, we fear abandonment, conflict, change, disappointment. We can’t banish those fears, but we can decide how to carry them.
When our fear of abandonment packs our bags, it tends to overpack to regain total control: constantly sending texts, subtly monitoring our partner, preemptively defending our behavior. The pack gets heavy. What we truly need isn’t control but trust—our faith that connection can bend without breaking.
When our fear of conflict is leading the way, we pack resentment instead of honesty. We tell ourselves we’re “keeping the peace,” but inside, unspoken tensions rub like grit in a boot. A lighter kit is open communication—saying what’s true with kindness and listening without preparing a rebuttal.
When fear of vulnerability takes over, we armor up. We withhold affection or humor because tenderness feels dangerous. Yet real protection doesn’t come from armor; it comes from flexible boundaries—gear that moves with the terrain.
The Buddha’s Ultralight Principle
Buddhism begins with an acknowledgment most of us resist: dukkha, the stress, unease, and unreliability woven through existence. Life, and therefore love, is inherently unstable. No pack, however well organized, can keep the weather from changing.
Our suffering multiplies when we expect otherwise. When we demand that partnership be free of difficulty, each bump feels like failure. But when we accept that friction is part of the trail, we can stop blaming ourselves—and our partner—for the dust and sweat that comes with the journey.
Once we stop insisting that love be easy, we discover its beauty again: two imperfect travelers sharing the road, sometimes lost, sometimes luminous, always learning how to walk together with less weight.
Fear Weighs Most When It’s Unseen
With my students and in my own marriage, I’ve noticed that fear’s heaviest form is unconscious. We think we’re fighting about dishes or who will drive the kids to swim practice, but underneath lies something tender: Will you still love me if I’m difficult? If I slow down? If I show you who I really am?
When we bring curiosity to those hidden fears, they begin to soften. Just naming them—”I’m scared you’ll leave” or “I’m afraid you’ll find me uninteresting”—turns a boulder into something you can actually carry. Simply noticing what we carry begins to lighten the load.
My wife and I have lived through our share of messy mornings with fights that begin over nothing and spin us in circles for an hour or more. What we’ve learned again and again is that love doesn’t mean fear disappears. It means we can feel fear and still take the next step together.
Relationship Gear Check: A Practice
Take five quiet minutes alone and complete the following:
Spread Out Your Gear
Imagine emptying your emotional pack onto the ground. What fears, expectations, or protective habits are you carrying? Write them down without judgment.Sort Essentials from Extras
Which items truly keep the relationship alive—honesty, humor, tenderness, shared purpose? Which are heavy duplicates—perfectionism, people-pleasing, unspoken scorekeeping?Repack with Intention
Choose one unnecessary item to leave behind this week. It could be the reflex to interrupt, the nightly phone scroll, or the old story that love means never needing space. See how the walk feels with that weight removed.
You’ll still carry your fears. But when carried wisely, they become teachers instead of tyrants.
To live and love is to hike an unpredictable trail—sometimes uphill in rain, sometimes downhill in sunlight, always with the same mysterious horizon ahead. The point isn’t to go ultralight overnight—it’s to keep learning what belongs in the pack and what can finally, mercifully, be set down.
by nico hase, PhD
