On Love
Human beings live as though breathing and loving were the same act. The world holds countless definitions of love, and I respect them all. But here, I want to tell a different story — my own. To me, love is simply this: the desire to cherish and protect what matters. I want to walk through life alongside those who recognize something true in that definition, however plain it may sound.
1. The Weight of Love: From Feeling to Practice
Love is universal. Held silently inside, it cannot become a crime. But the moment love crosses the threshold of the heart and enters the world, something changes. The act — regardless of intention — becomes a heavy responsibility. Sometimes, a tragic one.
We cannot transmit love with perfect transparency. My passion may burn the person I intend to warm. My devotion may feel like suffocation to the person I intend to free.
This is why love, when brought into the open, demands a particular kind of carefulness — almost painful in its thoroughness.
And yet we must bring it out. Because love kept only in the mind cannot shelter anything from the rain. Love exists to be practiced. And the most concrete form of that practice is protection.
2. What Protection Actually Requires
What does it mean to truly protect something?
The world offers as many answers as it does forms of love. Consider animal protection: one school of thought preserves wildness, another prioritizes coexistence with humans. The methods are opposite — yet both arise from the same limitation. We cannot fully know what an animal experiences from the inside. And this is no less true between human beings.
We might say that protection, at its most basic, requires that the protected be able to feel protected. But this standard alone is insufficient. We cannot perfectly confirm that another person feels what we intend them to feel.
So a more practical standard is needed. Protection that comes from love must be preceded by a genuine attempt to understand. And here is the difficult truth: we cannot fully understand another person. What I believe I know about you is always a fragment. Always partial.
This is precisely why love demands more caution, not less. The only thing that separates protection from possession is this: the willingness to hold the fear of being wrong — and to keep looking, keep asking, keep learning. Protection without the humility to understand is not protection. It becomes violence.
3. Where Love and Possession Diverge
We often confuse the desire to possess with the feeling of love. This is not a character flaw. It is entirely natural — even inevitable. Possession, like love, involves tending to something, wanting it to stay close, caring for its continuation. The behaviors look almost identical from the outside. Of course we confuse them. How could we not?
But their roots are different — and so the destruction they produce is incomparable.
When we protect out of love: the gaze moves outward, toward the other. We acknowledge our incomplete understanding, and we keep moving in the direction that allows the other person’s own agency to breathe and grow.
When we protect out of possession: the gaze turns inward. The effort to understand is skipped. What is called protection becomes a mechanism for managing our own anxiety, or maintaining our own convenience.
4. The Nature of Possessive Desire: Not a Sin, But a Direction
Possessive desire is not, in itself, a sin. Ownership is the most realistic strategy humans have adopted for survival, and possessive desire is the force that drives it. When we are hungry, we want food. When we are cold, we want warmth. Possessive desire is close to instinct — written deeply into the human condition.
The essential difference between love and possessive desire is not the presence or absence of desire. It is the direction of the standard.
With possessive desire, the standard is me. What can this thing offer me? What do I gain from it? That is what matters.
With love, the standard is the other. What does this person need? What allows them to exist fully? That is what drives the movement.
Possessive desire, while it stays inside the heart, harms no one. But the moment it crosses outward and is directed at another person, it becomes violence. A desire calibrated only to oneself persists regardless of what the other person is going through — and so it will inevitably collide with their will. When that collision is ignored, the other person is reduced to an object. Their agency disappears.
A desire that wears the name of love but keeps itself as the standard is not love. It is projection.
So the problem is not that we carry possessive desire. We all do. The problem is mistaking it for love — and releasing it outward. The moment it crosses the threshold, we must keep asking: whose standard am I using? Mine, or theirs?
5. Love Applied: What It Looks Like in Practice
I love money too. If love means understanding what something is and protecting the integrity of that nature, then money is a worthy object of love.
To love money is not to accumulate it. It is to understand what money actually is. Money is not value itself — it is a scale, a tool for measuring and exchanging value. To love money is to guard that function: to ensure that money does not become the purpose of life and collapse the order of real value beneath it.
My love applies to my child as well. What I love is not every action my child takes — it is his existence, and his agency. I want him to move through his relationships without losing himself.
If he hurts someone weaker, I will not simply punish the act. I will look more carefully. Was this a clumsy attempt to connect? A reaction to something that made him uncomfortable? The desire to understand must come first. Discipline, when it comes, becomes something different: not punishment, but the teaching of how to be at ease with others. What I am protecting is not just the person he hurt — it is his own dignity. His own agency. His ability to live without becoming someone he is not.
6. The Tragedy of Protective Possession: The Case of Hitler
The most extreme example of this confusion is Adolf Hitler’s love for Germany.
What that love looked like is documented in the chapter titled “The State” in Mein Kampf. What Hitler loved was not the land, and not the people living on it. What he loved was an idea: a state built for the flourishing of the Aryan race. He built institutions, designed systems, and chose war — all in service of that idea.
Did his love succeed?
He wanted a Germany for the Aryan people. And yet he sent those very people to the front lines. He consumed Aryan lives in the name of Aryan flourishing. He used as a means the very people he claimed to protect.
I cannot separate his love from his possessive desire. If his standard had been the other — if his gaze had actually rested on the lives and safety of real people — the decision to send them to die would have been impossible. But his standard, until the end, was the idea he held in his mind. The actual people were instruments for realizing that idea. What he loved was not the Aryan people. It was his own desire to possess a nation composed of them.
What makes this most tragic is that he believed it was love. He was certain he was giving himself for Germany. A person who rushes toward an idea without ever trying to understand the people inside it will die having mistaken their possessive desire for devotion. And when that mistake wears the face of absolute conviction, the violence it produces reaches its greatest scale.
Hitler’s case is not extreme because of its size. It is extreme because it shows us exactly how far a human being can go when possessive desire has fully disguised itself as love.
7. Loving Yourself — Without Possessing Yourself
As I have argued throughout: love is protection grounded in understanding. Hitler skipped that understanding entirely. That is why I cannot agree with what he called love.
And yet — loving one’s own idea is not inherently wrong. In fact, it is necessary. I survive because I love myself. Without some fundamental orientation toward my own existence, there is no ground to stand on, no reason to continue. Self-love is not a luxury. It is the precondition of living.
But loving myself is not the same as possessing myself.
Both point inward. The direction is the same. And yet they produce entirely different lives.
When I love myself, my agency becomes the center. I ask: what do I actually need? What allows me to exist fully, as myself? The standard is my own unfolding — my capacity to grow, to choose, to remain recognizably mine.
When I possess myself, my raw desire takes over. Agency becomes a tool in service of that desire. I believe I am acting for myself — but in truth, the desire is driving me.
Do not possess yourself. Love yourself.
And the way to love yourself is to try to understand yourself. I cannot fully understand myself. But among all the things in this world, I am one of the few I can actually look at directly. Another person’s inner life reaches me only as fragments. My own, at least, I can approach from the inside.
Only those who have loved themselves can love others. Only those who have tried to understand themselves know what it means to try to understand someone else. Only those who have been humble with themselves can be humble before others.
Love does not begin outside. It always begins within.
Conclusion
Love always moves toward protection. But whether that protection is truly directed at the other — or is only serving our own desire to hold on — must be questioned until the very end.
Only when we admit the tragic truth that we cannot fully understand another person does the possibility of genuine protection open up. Paradoxically, it is the acknowledgment of our own incompleteness that makes love possible at all.
True love is not holding the other inside our hands. It is staying beside them — with the caution of someone who knows they might be wrong — so that they can exist, fully, as themselves.
Was the love I loved — love? Or was it longing to possess?