Love is selfless, a wave of unadulterated positive emotion we feel from the bottom of our hearts for someone. If love is pure, how does it become suffocating sometimes?

While love is enough to create a bond, it is not sufficient to maintain that cord because affection doesn’t exist on its own. A relationship is affected by an amalgamation of other feelings like anger, gratitude, pride, self-respect, etc. Along side them come personal opinions, beliefs and such which convolute the threads of a relationship even further.

We cannot live our lives without all these other emotions and ideologies because, together, they make us who we are. But it is important that we recognise which feelings and/or beliefs are dictating our actions with loved ones. Only then can we put in personal checks and balances. Otherwise, too often, we hide behind the cover of love to make ourselves feel better about controlling the lives of people we care and to get them to act as we see fit.

Love is pure and unconditional, so let’s not wield it as a weapon against the very people we want to protect.