When Does Love Become Possession?
Part II of a four-part exploration of one question: What does it mean to love another person without losing yourself—or them?
Recently, I've noticed an uncomfortable truth about myself.
Whenever something in my life becomes deeply meaningful, I immediately start wondering how to protect it.
I do it with friendships.
I do it with writing.
And, perhaps most of all, I do it in love.
At first, that instinct seems beautiful. Of course you want to protect the people who make your life better. But recently I’ve started asking myself a different question.
At what point does protecting someone quietly become possessing them?
For a long time, I assumed the answer was obvious.
Possession looked like control. Jealousy. Restricting another person’s freedom.
The usual things.
But the longer I’ve been married, the less convinced I am that possession always announces itself so dramatically.
Sometimes it arrives much more quietly.
Through ordinary routines.
Through habits.
Through love itself.
Relationships ask a great deal of us.
We invest our time, attention, vulnerability, emotions, and hope. Slowly, almost without noticing, we build a life that neither of us could have created alone.
Maybe that’s because we’re creatures of habit. Or maybe it’s simply because uncertainty is exhausting. Either way, we slowly build our lives around another person’s existence.
Love doesn’t become possession all at once. It happens through hundreds of ordinary moments that slowly teach us to experience another person’s life as part of our own.
I’ve experienced this in surprisingly small ways.
Before we started living together, I wasn’t afraid of sleeping alone.
I actually enjoyed it.
The silence belonged to me.
Then, over the course of a year or so, something changed so gradually I didn’t even notice it happening.
Now, whenever my partner is away, the same house feels strangely unfamiliar. Nothing has changed. The walls are the same. The bedroom is the same.
But the darkness started feeling intimidating.
It takes me a while to remember that, once upon a time, I felt completely at home in that same silence.
Perhaps what I fear losing isn’t the person themselves.
Perhaps it’s the life that exists only when they’re part of it.
That realization made me rethink something else I had always assumed I understood.
Jealousy.
I don’t think the feeling is always about ownership. Or even about the fear of being replaced. Sometimes I wonder whether jealousy begins somewhere else.
I imagine my partner having an experience I’ll never be part of.
A conversation that profoundly changes him.
A place that leaves a permanent mark on him.
A moment of intimacy, joy, grief, or wonder that belongs entirely to someone else.
Nothing immoral has happened. Nothing has been taken from me. Yet something inside me quietly whispers:
I wasn’t there.
Perhaps what makes jealousy so painful isn’t that someone else touches the person we love.
It’s realizing there are experiences that can shape them forever without us ever being part of them.
Maybe what we call jealousy is sometimes grief over exclusion.
Not exclusion by intention. Just by reality.
No two consciousnesses can ever completely overlap.
No matter how deeply we love one another, there will always be places inside another person’s life where we cannot follow.
That thought unsettles me. Not because I want to own another person. But because I want to witness them.
Perhaps those are not the same thing after all.
Arthur Schopenhauer would probably smile at this observation.
He believed romantic love was far less mysterious than we like to think. What feels deeply personal may simply be nature ensuring our attachment to one another. The intensity, the longing, even the jealousy—they may all serve a biological purpose before they serve an emotional one.
Perhaps he’s right.
Biology explains why attachment begins. But it doesn’t explain how we should love once attachment exists.
For that, I find Erich Fromm much more convincing.
Fromm argued that there are two fundamentally different ways of relating to the world.
One is having.
The other is being.
The person living in the mode of having asks:
How do I keep this?
How do I make sure it doesn’t disappear?
How do I secure it?
The person living in the mode of being asks something entirely different.
How do I experience this while it is here?
The difference seems subtle. I don’t think it is.
One approaches love as possession.
The other approaches love as participation.
One is constantly trying to guarantee tomorrow. The other remains fully present today.
Reading Fromm made me wonder whether possession isn’t really about controlling another person. Perhaps it’s about trying to freeze life itself.
To stop another person from changing.
To stop ourselves from changing.
To preserve a version of “us” that once made us feel safe.
But love refuses to stay still. People continue growing. Experiences continue shaping them. Every conversation, every friendship, every disappointment, every success quietly transforms the person standing beside us.
Maybe that is what makes love so frightening.
You never fall in love with a finished person. You fall in love with someone who will continue becoming someone else.
This is where Simone Weil offers an answer I keep returning to.
She wrote that attention is the purest form of generosity.
Not advice.
Not sacrifice.
Not protection.
Attention.
There is something profoundly different about attending to another person instead of trying to preserve them.
Attention doesn’t ask another person to remain unchanged. It doesn’t insist that every meaningful experience includes us.
It simply says:
I’m here.
I see who you’re becoming.
I’m willing to meet this new version of you.
Perhaps that is the closest we can ever come to sharing another person’s inner world. Not possessing it. Not entering every room of their consciousness. But remaining present at the door whenever they choose to invite us in.
I don’t think there is a universal formula for love.
Every relationship invents its own language. Its own boundaries. Its own understanding of freedom.
The greatest mistake I’ve made is believing that love comes with a script.
Our parents’ script.
Society’s script.
A therapist’s script.
A philosopher’s script.
The longer I’m married, the more convinced I become that every couple eventually has to answer these questions for themselves.
What does freedom mean to us?
What belongs only to me?
What belongs to both of us?
And what kinds of experiences do we accept we’ll never be able to share?
I’ve also stopped thinking of compromise as sacrificing pieces of yourself.
Now it feels more like architecture.
Two people slowly building a space neither could have imagined alone. Not your world. Not mine.
Ours.
Perhaps that’s what belonging has always meant.
Not becoming another person’s possession.
Not possessing them in return.
But creating a life together while accepting that some parts of each other’s inner worlds will always remain beautifully, and painfully, unreachable.
Thank you for giving me words for my own experiences. I have called myself clingy or needy or other negatively connoted things, but underneath it all, I just want to witness those I love. To see their everyday lives, moment by moment. But you’re right, even if I don’t like it: some parts are theirs alone. And love has to accept that.
It's because of Hollywood,Bollywood Movies,and We are more into that because we believe that our partners is our soulmate not just physical Partners
Religiously:It's already written in skies.