Obsession
Why We Confuse Fixation With Love
Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,
Be honest…
Have you ever been obsessed with someone?
You couldn’t stop thinking about them.
You fantasize about them all day…
Until you start to imagine a relationship that wasn’t real.
You aren’t even on the other person’s radar.
But you’re hooked.
You have feelings for them…
And they barely know you.
They’re living rent-free in your mind around the clock.
While they hardly know you exist.
Have you ever been obsessed with someone who didn’t feel the same way?
Perhaps you spent so much time thinking about them...
Fantasizing about them...
Imagining all the ways your life will be perfect now that you’ve finally found them.
That you never stopped to think about the fact that sometimes they mistreat you.
You want them at any cost.
So you “try to make it work.”
You overlook red flags, character flaws, and incompatibility.
You turn a blind eye.
Later on, you’ve built up a ton of resentment.
Because you abandoned yourself just to get your fix.
What’s going on here?
I just finished watching the movie Obsession and it played like a documentary of my old life.
Which is terrifying.
A guy named Patrick makes a wish for the girl he likes, Karin, to love him more than anyone else in the world.
The movie instantly becomes uncomfortable.
Karin wants to be at Patrick’s side 24/7.
It’s all she cares about.
I’ve been there.
Patrick goes to work and she stands in the same spot waiting for him to return all day.
Patrick returns to find her standing in her own pee and shit.
Once the wish is made, Karin nukes Patrick’s social life.
Yup - been there.
She puts a strain on every relationship he has.
His friends become resentful.
And Patrick has this growing desire for space.
They stage an intervention.
Patrick’s friend asks him to come over for a boys’ night.
Karin makes Patrick feel so guilty that he brings her along anyway.
He can’t get away from her for three hours.
Humiliating.
And Patrick is terrified of this woman.
He has no idea how to handle Karin’s constant need for attention.
He wakes up in the middle of the night to find Karin standing in a corner watching him sleep.
At one point, they’re playing a party game and Patrick pulls a card telling him to kiss the person to his left.
Karin violently drags the girl out of the way so she can take her place.
Now, Karin is the one who gets kissed.
Then she starts smashing herself over the head until she’s bleeding.
Patrick is traumatized.
I’ve been there — with someone willing to do or say almost anything to maintain control over me.
Including self-harm.
Seven weeks before I got married, my fiancée broke her big toe.
She “joked” that she did it on purpose, which unsettled me.
I wrote it down in my journal.
At the time, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe someone would intentionally hurt themselves to manipulate me.
That felt like a bridge too far.
Either way, I waited on my fiancée constantly in the weeks leading up to our wedding.
It was exhausting.
I felt like she was putting me through some kind of test of devotion.
I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand it.
I could relate to Patrick's humiliation at Karin’s behavior around their friends.
To the part where Karin goes from normal to batshit crazy in the blink of an eye.
It’s confusing and terrifying.
It doesn’t take more than a handful of moments like that before Karin takes over Patrick’s life.
His entire life gets oriented around avoiding these moments.
After Karin smashes her head in at boys’ night, I remember thinking that if I were Patrick, I’d never show my face in that friend group again.
People have very little sympathy for men trapped in coercive relationships.
It breaks their preconceived notions.
And, it’s not the most manly look.
I wanted to keep my dysfunctional relationship hidden from the public so nobody could see how bad things really were.
The whole thing was overwhelming.
I felt so smothered.
Stifled…
Suffocated…
There was this constant pressure to satisfy her.
How I felt about it never factored into the equation.
I felt so unseen.
Now, if I’m being honest, I’ve also been obsessed with other people.
Many times.
Too many.
Like that one time I learned a song on the flute to try to impress a girl.
Oops.
Often in matters of love, we place too much weight on the other person.
We aren’t just trying to satisfy our romantic needs.
Subconsciously, we are trying to resolve our unfinished business from childhood.
We’re trying to pay an old debt.
To meet our unmet emotional needs.
If I can make the object of devotion fall in love with me…
That means I am good enough.
I am adequate.
This is why the dynamic between two people can become so unbalanced.
So one-sided.
In the movie, Patrick keeps asking:
Where is the real Karin?
Is this obsession real love?
That’s the problem with obsession.
You can become so fixated on someone else…
That you lose yourself.
There’s no real person left for them to fall in love with.
You can’t invest in someone before they’ve earned it.
Tony V.
Editor-in-Chief
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I think with obsession and love, the differences are easy to spot. One nurtures co-dependency while the other nurtures freedom.
Obsession isn't real love, it's objectification. Well written!