Does loving someone too much push them away?
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Hi there,
We tend to believe that people pull away because we loved them too much. We’ve repeated this narrative after or during a relationship where someone slowly became distant.
We convince ourselves that our sensitivity, our depth, our devotion, or simply our love was somehow “too much.”
But loving someone isn’t the problem. Love itself doesn’t push people away.
What creates distance is when love turns into a strategy: people-pleasing, rescuing, over-functioning, caretaking, or trying to secure someone’s affection by being everything they need. It’s when caring for them becomes a way to secure their affection, or when attention becomes a form of control disguised as generosity.
It doesn’t feel like a strategy in the moment. It feels like love. But what’s actually happening underneath is subtle self-abandonment. And self-abandonment always turns into pressure — for you and for the other person.
This isn’t love; it’s an unconscious transaction. And the human psyche recognizes the difference, even if we cannot yet name it.
And here is the paradox: The more we manage or try to be enough for them, the less the other person feels free to love us voluntarily. Love cannot grow in the soil of obligation. It needs autonomy to breathe.
The moment love turns into responsibility, management, or emotional labor, the roles we play with one another fundamentally shift.
In many relationships, when love becomes caretaking, the dynamic changes. One partner becomes the emotional anchor; the other becomes the emotional project. Desire and attraction don’t thrive in this imbalance because desire thrives in separateness — in the recognition of the other as someone distinct from us. When we take responsibility for their emotional world, we diminish that separateness, and the erotic bond begins to fray.
When we “love” someone to the point that we are ignoring our lives in the process, I tend to think of it as turning ourselves into a supporting character in someone else’s movie. They’re the complicated, emotionally unavailable protagonist, and you’re the endlessly patient, slightly exhausted love interest. You keep waiting for them to have their big character arc. Spoiler: They usually don’t. In fact, what usually happens is that you both end up resenting each other and not wanting to have sex.
So what does it look like to love without losing ourselves?
It begins with reclaiming our inner authority — the ability to know what we feel, what we need, and what we desire, without contorting ourselves to fit the perceived expectations of another.
It means allowing the other person to have their experience, their emotions, their journey, without assuming responsibility for it.
It is a respect for difference rather than an attempt to smooth it away.
Real intimacy requires honesty, not just kindness. Desire requires freedom, not just closeness. And lasting connection requires two people who are capable of being fully themselves, side by side.
This is not about loving less. It is about loving differently.
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When you begin managing your partner’s feelings instead of expressing your own, the relationship loses reciprocity. When you become the emotional caretaker, you subtly instruct your partner to become the emotional child. And eventually, one of you resents the weight, and the other resents the neediness.
When we forget ourselves in the name of love, it is not only we who feel the loss; the other person feels it, too. They feel the absence of the partner they first came toward. They feel the pressure of emotional oversight. They sense that your well-being is contingent on their behavior, and this contingency becomes suffocating.
In the world of relational dynamics, we often imagine that more love equals more closeness. But closeness requires space — space for two separate selves to exist. When love collapses into over-identification, into fusion, or into rescue, it erodes that necessary space. The relationship becomes tight, and tightness rarely feels like intimacy; it feels like pressure.
We learned, consciously or unconsciously, that love is earned by being indispensable, by being agreeable, by smoothing the emotional landscape around us. And so, we continue. We “love” by managing.
This pattern usually begins long before we ever enter a romantic relationship. It begins in childhood. Many of us learn to attend to everyone else’s needs before our own. Maybe a parent was overwhelmed, and you became the “easy” kid. Or you grew up sensing tension, criticism, or emotional unpredictability and decided the safest role was to make things smoother for everyone. Or maybe the only time you received affection was when you were helpful or accommodating. Over time, taking care of others becomes part of your identity.
Later, in adult relationships, that same pattern shows up in love. We try to be indispensable. We anticipate what someone needs. We manage their emotions. We avoid conflict. We apologize for things that aren’t ours. We try to prevent any reason they might disconnect from us. That feels like devotion, but it’s really fear.
And the more we love like this, the more we leave ourselves out of the relationship.
When love becomes a strategy for connection, it stops feeling like love and starts feeling like pressure — both for you and for the person receiving it. And most importantly, it becomes love at your own expense. This is the part we often don’t see until much later, usually after we’re exhausted, disconnected, and resentful.
Love,
Jillian
This was so insightful, well written and timely for me to encounter. Thank you Jillian!