Toxic Love
When Love Resembles Hate
Holidays, vacations, leisure time, time together…all these are mostly fun times. You get more time to spend with your ‘significant other’, get to know each other, away from the company and the distractions of other people. This is a very good thing.
Sometimes.
I had posted something about toxic love, on Facebook. The day before that post, I had received a frantic telephone call, from an ex-student, and a seemingly endless series of messages on Facebook asking me for help and guidance about a relationship gone drastically, dangerously, sour.
Yesterday, I received another desperate call for help.
A different student. But give or take a few incidents, the same situation.
Back when I was growing up,( I still am, incidentally) everything was much simpler. We used to categorise such people as ‘bad woman/man or good woman/man.’ That was it. Everything is secure when you can label it neatly and keep it aside, until further notice.
But now, we accept that goodness and lack of goodness are matters of degree, that they are not absolute. Every relationship, whatever the nature or purpose, comes with its own mixture of shades and colours. And love is the most beautiful, and the most mysterious of them.
You can kill a person by loving them so much that you deny them an existence outside your presence or your immediate vicinity, mental or physical. Keeping tabs on a person’s movements and the company they keep plainly and clearly show your distrust and suspicion. Deciding who they must meet, talk to, or interact with, also denotes and highlights your own self-doubt and lack of confidence. The argument that you are only trying to protect them is only a fig leaf that you are using to cover your own inadequacies.
AND.
If you are at the receiving end of this kind of ‘love’, which is another name for hate, please watch out for the first signs. Don’t fall for the age-old defense that he/she is only doing/saying these because they love you.
Love is the sunshine that lets you grow, not the string that keeps you bound to a pole: love is the breeze beneath your growing wings, encouraging you to fly, not the blade that might clip your feathers for fear you might come to harm: love is the nest that will wait for you to fly back, not a barred window from which there is no escape.
Love can be liberating and sublimely satisfying. If you have found it, take care of it, nurture it, and watch it grow and change and stay steadfast.
Love can also kill.
Take care.
Stay safe.
