If you love somebody, actually love them, that active process of loving them has to involve respecting their autonomy and treating them accordingly.
Coveting someone like an object is a totally different process to loving, and the actions that make up that process will be different.
Loving requires seeing someone as separate from yourself; a complete and whole person with goals and motivations and needs equally valid and significant to your own. Love requires making active choices to be supportive of another person’s journey. It requires a desire to understand the unique individual you love, not so you can get things you want from them, but because you want to celebrate who they are as a person.
Caring about someone only until their boundaries inconvenience you isn’t love. Seeing people purely as more or less interchangeable props to be used to get certain things you need or want – sex, companionship, emotional or household work, a legacy, etc. – isn’t love. Prioritizing your own comfort over someone else’s autonomy isn’t love.
If you actually love someone, you do not want to control them. You aren’t interested in forcing, manipulating, or bullying them into submission. You are eager to understand them and support them in their own choices and goals, and even if you hope those goals will align with your own, if they don’t you are not interested in forcing that person to do as you say instead.
If someone actually loves you, they do not want to control you. They aren’t interested in forcing, manipulating, or bullying you into submission. They are eager to understand you and support you in your own choices and goals, and even if they hope your goals will align with their own, if they don’t align, that person is not interested in forcing you to do as they say instead.
Never believe that somebody wanting to have another person regardless of what the other person wants is the same kind of passion as love. Treating a person like a much-desired object is still treating a person like a thing to own and control, and that behaviour is incompatible with the actions involved in actually loving someone.
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