A tender person is likely to feel pain even at a gentle touch.
Nonetheless, a tender person is a gentle person, someone who approaches others with care in order to avoid causing them pain.
How can tender emotion include both things?
D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a drunken letter to writer Rachel Annand Taylor, “When one lies exposed and quiveringly vulnerable in print, or at the brutal publishers, it is nice to feel the warm hands of understanding quieting one… One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.”
The emotional core of tenderness isn’t held within a single person. It’s something that exists in relationships, in the way that a person interacts with something or someone else.
As comfort or as a source of pain, tenderness is about feeling open to feeling.
