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Bing Liu is the filmmaker behind “Minding the Gap,” a 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary that centers around three young skateboarders—one of whom is Liu himself—who are all coping with the trauma left by childhood abuse and trying to navigate what it means to be a man in the world. It is a particularly raw film, one that could only be made by someone who’s exceptionally comfortable with emotional vulnerability. It’s no surprise, then, that the 30-year-old Liu is just that.

On a recent episode of GQ’s Airplane Mode podcast, I was going to ask Liu about his documentary. Somehow, we ended up talking about ghosting instead—and what it says about our discomfort with honesty and vulnerability. Which led Liu into a deep dive on love: what we get wrong in defining it, why we endure hurt and pain from the people we love the most, and how we can bring more honesty and openness into our relationships.

Liu ends up answering one of the questions he was exploring with his documentary: “How do you look in the mirror and be vulnerable to yourself?” It’s something we could all use some help with. Here, Liu talks about how he does it—and fails to do it—and offers some sage advice on modern dating in the process.

I've seen you talk about using Minding the Gap as a vehicle to examine questions that you had—or confusing life situations you were dealing with—when you started filming in 2012.When I first started on Minding the Gap, I went around the country talking and speaking with a lot of people that I thought would be interesting to talk to. There were a couple questions I kept finding myself asking, because it really cut to the core of what I was trying to get at: Who taught you how to love? And who taught you how to hate?

How do you come to a question like that as a 23-year-old?I grew up in a time of memoirs and self-help. I latched onto a friend group that was artsy, and part of our rebellion was being emotional, especially as young men. Our version of rebelling was listening to emotional music and talking about our feelings. It was like, "Damn The Man, we're gonna cry." It felt good to have latched onto that as a form of rebellion. I don't think I recognized it as that back then—it was just something that was different, something that unconsciously or subconsciously made me feel like I could survive what I was going through.

I had something I was passionate about: exploring your emotional inner life, exploring how you become who you are. I think in hindsight—I realized this later on—I had an immense fear of becoming my stepfather, who was very abusive. With many people who haven't had good examples of how to become an adult, you do have examples of who you don't want to become. But it leaves a certain type of void, and I think that void, for me, was something that was really interesting and exciting to fill with how other people were figuring it out, and living it, and failing, and succeeding.

And you’ve said that you witnessed an emotional vulnerability in these people you were talking to—but that they didn't know necessarily how to talk about it.It wasn't the first time I saw emotional vulnerability. Most young people witness it and they experience it. But it's often a thing that's done more in private, in places where you feel safe. As a young person, you start to develop ways of protecting your emotions, because you slowly find out that it's less and less okay to be earnest, to be forthright, to be wearing your emotions on your sleeves. But to me, it was frustrating, because I had gotten to this point where I became passionate about emotional inner lives.

Even now, and back then, too, I feel like my ideal world is one in which we communicate with pillow-talks and truth circles all the time. It's my favorite thing, actually, to be in larger social settings where we're playing some game where there's no winning, it's just about being vulnerable and feeling safe. And having that tension be palpable in the room. It's electrifying when those experiences happen.

This makes me think of the phenomena of ghosting. I wish we could just say, "Look, I've enjoyed our first few dates together, you are great for XYZ, but I don't think it's a fit,” and then go separate ways. But we don't have that ability to be honest with each other and vulnerable in that way. It strikes me as a real failure of understanding and compassion in our culture.I just met someone in London a couple weeks ago. It was after a screening. I went out with a group of people, and I ended up going home with someone. And we hooked up, and then the next morning we shared an intimate breakfast. And we just really vibed. But as I was going to the airport the next day, we were What's App-ing, and she was like, "It would be great if we could reconnect, and go skate and travel, and make something together." And I was like, "Oh my god, will you marry me? Kidding, not kidding." And then she's like, "Yeah, kidding, but not kidding." And then a couple days later, she was like, "What if we decide to get married? What if, conceptually, we decide to get married?"

All of a sudden, it shifts the framework. Because the modern "game" of dating is about priorities. In dating and intimacy, if you prioritize the relationship first and foremost, then you're going to do what it takes to make a relationship work, to keep a relationship from falling apart. But if your priority shifts to trying to decide if this one single specific person is someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, it's a very different set of actions and thoughts that you have. All of a sudden it goes from, "I want to tell this person this, but I'm scared it might not make the relationship work," to, "I want to tell this person who I am, and my insecurities, and what I think works between us." Because I'm gonna enter a lifelong partnership with this person, and I don't want to be dishonest. I don't want to not be vulnerable.

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Why do you think it is that we're so afraid of being vulnerable?It's about our self worth, and avoiding emotional pain. I think if we prioritize relationships, we put a lot of self worth in whether the relationship works or not. A failure of the relationship is a failure and a rejection of us, as people. You're not worthy of a relationship. But with this experiment, it's like, "Oh, if this doesn't work, it's a rejection of you by this person," which isn't necessarily a rejection of you being not worthy in general. It's like, "Oh no, I'm just not compatible with this person." Even if this doesn't work out, I don't think I'll ever be able to date the same way again.

How is it working out?Most days, it doesn't detract from your insecurities and how difficult it is to talk about it—that's still there. But the framework makes it more okay. There's an incentive to talk about it in a way that's safer. You can't do it with everybody, you have to really be on the same level, and both want the same thing. I've been developing this documentary about millennial love, and everything just gelled, and the timing was right to do this.

When you were talking about interviewing the skateboarders, you were saying a lot of them didn't know how to define love even. Could you define what love means to you?Love is a verb, not a noun. Love only exists as an action where you're giving love, or you're receiving love. I believe it doesn't exist outside of that. You have to be very careful about drawing the boundaries of what is included inside the box of love. Pain and hurting another person should not be included. My definition of it is not inclusive of hurting, or giving or receiving pain intentionally. We learn as children this idea of, "They hurt me because they love me."

I read this book—it's what taught me a lot of these things—All About Love by bell hooks. She writes about going to this cocktail party and trying to get a sense of who in the room is okay and not okay with hurting their romantic partner. And people were like, "No, you should never hurt your romantic partner." But then when asked, "Is it okay to hurt your children in order to teach them something?" And most people said, yeah, it is.

Oftentimes, children receive pain from somebody who's supposed to love you, and oftentimes the parent defines it as love. And so we internalize that and grow up, and allow hurt ourselves as adults. I'm not saying, "That's wrong, this is right." I'm just saying: This is what happens. I'm not offering any solutions on the childhood side, except that parents should be conscious of the effects of what hurting your child does. That's how people tend to include pain in their definition of love, in a very subconscious way.

In Minding the Gap, the characters hold up a mirror to their own behavior, and examine who they are and how they can be their best selves. That seems like something you are exceptionally good at. Could you give people who are maybe not as good at being emotionally vulnerable some advice on how they might be better?I want to place it less on a spectrum of being good or bad at it. It's more like: Have you built up this muscle? It's like going to the gym. And that's how I often conceptualize therapy for people. It's less going to fix something; it's more like going to the gym for your soul. It's just part of staying healthy. It's not magic. It's just work. It's not easy. I think a lot of times people think about revisiting a painful memory as, you just do it, and all of a sudden some lesson comes out of it. But you need structure around it. It's not always gonna be painful. A lot of times it can be beautiful. It can be a part of redefining your narrative a little bit and taking control of your perception of yourself.

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I love the gym metaphor, because when you start going to therapy, you unearth a lot of painful stuff. If I didn't workout for 20 years, and then I go to the gym, it's gonna hurt. But because it's in the framework of “sore muscles mean growth,” I go back. But in therapy, you're like, "This is painful, I'm not going back." And it's because we've couched it in a framework that doesn't allow you to see pain or discomfort as growth, the way you might in physical fitness.I totally agree. One thing that's helped with coping with the pain and discomfort of vulnerability for me is looking at things from the perspective of my deathbed. Just taking that Carl Sagan view of things. In the grand scheme of things, the things that I'm worried about in terms of vulnerability—which often come from: What do people think about me? Are people going to hurt me? Am I going to feel like I'm not worthy?—if I just Carl Sagan out, and look at the tiny pale blue dot, I'm like, "Okay, how much does this stuff actually matter in the grand scheme of things?"

I think skateboarding is a kinetic version of that. As soon as you're not present while you're skateboarding, that's when you get hurt, that's when you fall. It forces you to be present. Also, there's very little benefit in it. It's very hard to get sponsored and become a career skateboarder. The reasons why you do it are so much of an antithesis to the rat race of our society, of capitalism. It reminds you how constructed everything is. That's another way for me to cope with the pain and discomfort of vulnerability: Remembering how constructed everything is.

It sounds like that's how you thought about marriage, too.It's less about the marriage itself. It's more about trying to get intimacy and love in this difficult thing that we are living in, this crazy short amount of time that we're here on earth.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQPodcastLevel UpAirplane ModeSex and Relationships