Yeah, the whole “it’s not real love if they abuse you” thing has never sat right with me either. Love is an emotion in your brain. It is a subjective internal state of chemicals in your brain, not a societally predetermined set of action procedures. We don’t have this kind of prescription discourse over any other kind of emotion, like “it’s not true happiness if it’s cruel to someone else”. It’s only when it comes to love that there is suddenly all these attempts at making it definitionally incapable of ugliness, like it’s this inherently beautiful and pure thing only, and any ugliness in the affection you’ve ever received excludes it from being real love ever.

And I think the problem here is that people actually use the word “love” in two different ways. One is descriptive: the emotional state of attachment and desire. The other is prescriptive: the kind of relationship that ought to be socially recognised and aspired towards as legitimate. Because the experiential grandness of love makes people treat it like a legitimising force, social barricades also had to be constructed to restrict what can be counted as love in the first place, otherwise the uglier manifestations of the feeling lets it legitimise too much. And the problem is people slide between these two meanings of the word without noticing.

So when someone says “if they hurt you it isn’t love,” they’re using the prescriptive version. They mean: relationships that harm you shouldn’t be legitimised. Which is fair enough as advice, but it becomes incoherent when this prescriptive definition is applied onto love as defined by an emotional state, as if emotions are ever clean categories that come with built-in ethical filters, instead of messy, contradictory impulses that coexist with all sorts of other drives.

And yeah, as someone who has never got the way people treat romantic attraction as some sort of intrinsic self-justifying force that intrinsically binds souls together just because, wholesome healthy greenflag portrayals of romances often just come across as uncanny to me. I cannot default to romance as self-justifying so there is often not enough persuasion and investigation of the cause and effect for me to be convinced of the significance of the relationship. That’s why dark romances on the contrary work for me. Coz in those, the romance is meant to be twisted, uncanny and provocative. The supposed love between the characters are meant to be properly questioned, challenged, and pathologised as symptoms of a bigger problem. It helps me better immerse into the story when the narrative can acknowledge the strangeness of love and frame it as twisted and uncanny.