They Say They Love You, So Why Does It Hurt?
On the difference between wanting someone and knowing how to love them.
I have never been in an abusive romantic relationship, at least not in the way people usually describe one. I don’t want to speak as if I understand what it feels like to live through something I haven’t personally experienced.
But I’ve observed enough, listened to enough stories, and experienced enough contradictions in relationships to find myself returning to one question:
Can someone genuinely love their partner and still hurt them in ways that become abusive?
I don’t think the answer is as simple as saying they never loved them in the first place. But I also don’t think that having feelings for someone automatically means you know how to love them.
And maybe that’s where the confusion begins.
When wanting someone looks like love
I’ve always imagined love as something gentle.
Not something perfect, because I know that people make mistakes, misunderstand each other, become frustrated, and sometimes hurt each other without intending to. But even when love is difficult, I thought there should be something underneath it that makes you careful with the person you love.
You might disagree with them, but you don’t deliberately make them feel small. You might feel jealous, but you don’t treat your jealousy as permission to control them. You might be afraid of losing them, but you don’t make them afraid of losing you.
At least, that’s how I used to understand it.
Then I started noticing how differently people seem to define love.
Some people describe love through sacrifice. Others describe it through loyalty, protection, or the willingness to stay. Some believe jealousy means they care deeply. Some see controlling a partner as a way of keeping the relationship safe. And some seem to believe that because they love someone, they have a right to that person’s time, attention, choices, and even forgiveness.
It makes me wonder whether we sometimes confuse wanting someone with loving someone.
Wanting someone can come from many places. We might want their companionship, their affection, the way they make us feel, or the comfort of knowing they are there. We might become attached to the role they play in our lives. We might fear losing them because we cannot imagine being alone, because we need their validation, or because their presence has become part of how we understand ourselves.
None of those feelings necessarily means our affection is fake.
But they don’t automatically mean we know how to love someone well, either.
There is a difference between wanting someone to stay and caring about what it costs them to stay.
And I think that difference matters more than we sometimes realize.
Can feelings be genuine while actions contradict them?
I started questioning this more seriously after experiencing manipulation through cheating.
What unsettled me wasn’t only the dishonesty itself. It was the contradiction between what someone could say or make me feel and what they were actually choosing to do.
It made me wonder: if someone wants you, seeks your affection, or seems to enjoy being close to you, does that mean they love you?
And if they do have feelings for you, how do those feelings coexist with choices that hurt you?
I don’t think one experience gave me the answers. If anything, it made me more aware of how little I could know about another person’s internal world.
I couldn’t confidently say what someone felt, how deeply they felt it, or what love meant to them. I could only look at what happened, how it affected me, and whether their actions aligned with what they communicated.
That distinction has stayed with me.
We often try to resolve the contradiction by choosing one explanation: either the person genuinely loved us, or they never cared at all.
Maybe that’s because believing someone cared about us while still choosing to hurt us is harder to process. It means accepting that affection and harmful behaviour can exist in the same person.
Someone can miss you and still be dishonest with you. They can enjoy being close to you and still disregard your feelings. They can want a relationship and still fail to treat the other person with the care a healthy relationship requires.
I don’t think acknowledging that makes their feelings more important than their actions.
It simply means feelings alone cannot tell us everything we need to know about a relationship.
And perhaps the more useful question isn’t always, Did they love me?
Sometimes it’s, What did their version of love ask me to tolerate?
The first versions of love we learn
I wonder how much of our understanding of love begins before we even know how to define it.
As children, we don’t usually sit down and analyze the relationships around us. We observe them. We experience how people correct us, comfort us, discipline us, and distribute their attention. Over time, those experiences can influence what we come to expect from love.
I grew up with a mother who was strict. When I made mistakes or crossed a boundary, physical punishment was sometimes part of how she disciplined me. She could slap or pinch me, and the explanation was that she wanted to teach me, to make sure I understood my limits.
I can appreciate that she wanted to raise me well without agreeing with every method she used.
Both things can be true.
I can recognize the intention behind someone’s actions and still question the impact those actions had. Understanding why a parent did something doesn’t automatically mean the experience was harmless, just as acknowledging the harm doesn’t require me to reduce the entire person to their mistakes.
For a long time, I didn’t necessarily have the language to separate those things. I was a child trying to understand the world through the explanations adults gave me.
If something hurt but was explained as love, what was I supposed to make of that?
I don’t mean that childhood discipline and abusive romantic relationships are the same thing. They are different experiences, with different dynamics and consequences. But reflecting on my childhood has made me curious about a broader question: when someone tells us that a painful experience comes from love, how do we learn to decide whether that explanation makes sense?
I also remember feeling that expectations at home were not always distributed equally between my sister and me.
My mother often asked me to do household chores, while my sister didn’t have to do as much. When I was younger, I wondered whether my sister was simply smarter than me, or whether there was something about her that made things easier for her.
As I grew older, I understood a more practical explanation: I was often better at those chores and didn’t need to be told what to do repeatedly. My mother could rely on me to get things done.
That explanation makes sense to me now.
Still, I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be the child who is trusted because they are capable, but who consequently has to carry more responsibility.
When you’re young, you don’t always interpret unequal expectations through the logic an adult might use. You interpret them through what they seem to say about your place in the family.
I can’t say that these experiences determined how I understand love today. That would be too simple. But they have given me something to reflect on: how easily we can begin attaching meaning to the way people treat us, especially before we have the perspective to question it.
Maybe being useful can start to feel like a way to earn appreciation. Maybe being the capable one means being expected to manage more. Maybe a child can understand the reason behind an adult’s behaviour and still wonder whether the arrangement is fair.
And maybe, as we grow older, we carry some of those early assumptions into our relationships without even realizing it.
Not because our childhood defines every relationship we will ever have, but because the experiences we grow up with can become part of the lens through which we interpret other people’s actions.
When control is mistaken for care
This is where my original question becomes more difficult.
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What if someone has learned that love means protecting a person, but their idea of protection becomes control?
What if they believe jealousy is proof that someone matters to them? What if they interpret a partner’s independence as rejection, or their boundaries as a threat to the relationship?
Fear of losing someone can be a real feeling. So can insecurity, jealousy, and emotional dependence. Experiencing these emotions doesn’t automatically make someone abusive.
But what someone feels and what they choose to do with those feelings are two different things.
Feeling afraid that your partner might leave you does not give you the right to restrict their freedom. Feeling jealous does not justify monitoring their every move. Feeling hurt does not give you permission to intimidate, humiliate, threaten, or manipulate them.
There may be situations in which a person genuinely experiences their behaviour as love. They might believe they are protecting the relationship, preventing abandonment, or holding on to someone important to them.
But their interpretation of their behaviour isn’t the only one that matters.
A person can intend to protect someone while making that person feel trapped. They can believe they are expressing care while repeatedly disregarding the other person’s boundaries. They can fear losing someone so intensely that they begin treating that person’s independence as something to overcome rather than respect.
Understanding the possible emotions behind these behaviours can help us think more carefully about them. It cannot, by itself, establish what someone feels or why they behave as they do.
And it certainly doesn’t make the behaviour acceptable.
I think this is an important distinction because we sometimes become so interested in understanding the person causing harm that we forget to examine the harm itself.
We ask whether they were insecure, whether they were afraid of abandonment, whether they had a difficult childhood, or whether they had ever experienced healthy love.
Those questions can be worth exploring. But they are not substitutes for accountability.
A possible explanation is not a justification. A person’s history may help us understand how they came to behave in certain ways, but it doesn’t erase their responsibility to recognize the harm they cause and work to stop it.
We can have compassion for someone’s struggles without making another person responsible for enduring them.
Understanding someone doesn’t mean accepting everything they do
Perhaps one of the most confusing things about relationships is that people are rarely only one thing.
Someone can have qualities we genuinely appreciate and still make choices that hurt us. Someone can show affection in certain moments and behave cruelly in others. Someone can have experienced pain themselves and still cause pain to another person.
Recognizing these contradictions doesn’t require us to decide that every good moment was fake.
But neither should the existence of good moments make us dismiss the bad ones.
I think we sometimes feel pressure to determine whether someone is a good person or a bad person before we can decide how to respond to their behaviour. We search for an explanation that will make everything fit neatly together.
If they loved us, why did they do that?
If they cared, why didn’t they stop?
If they understood that we were hurting, why did the behaviour continue?
I don’t have universal answers to those questions. In some situations, the person may lack the skills to manage difficult emotions. In others, they may prioritize their own wants over their partner’s well-being. The circumstances differ, and we cannot reliably infer someone’s motives from the outside.
But we don’t need complete access to another person’s mind to recognize when their behaviour is harmful.
We can acknowledge that someone may have genuine feelings for us without concluding that the relationship is healthy. We can understand the reasons they offer without agreeing that those reasons justify their choices. And we can care about someone while deciding that we cannot continue participating in a dynamic that hurts us.
Love does not require us to abandon our ability to evaluate what is happening to us.
If anything, learning to distinguish someone’s intentions from their impact might be one of the ways we develop a more responsible understanding of love.
Intentions matter. They can tell us something about what a person hoped to do.
But impact matters, too. It tells us something about what their actions actually mean for the person experiencing them.
And accountability is what connects the two: the willingness to listen when someone says they have been hurt, acknowledge the consequences of one’s behaviour, respect boundaries, and make meaningful changes rather than relying on affection or apologies alone.
Without accountability, the claim of love can become a way to end the conversation instead of a reason to change.
But I love you.
Maybe they do feel love.
The question is whether they are willing to take responsibility for how they express it.
So, can someone love their partner and still be abusive?
I’m still figuring out what love should look like. I don’t think my experiences have given me enough knowledge to answer this question for every relationship, and I don’t want to pretend that they have.
I do think it’s possible for someone to experience genuine attachment, affection, or even what they sincerely understand as love while behaving abusively. Human feelings are complicated, and the presence of one feeling doesn’t prevent someone from acting in ways that contradict it.
But I also think we need to be careful about what we mean when we say someone loves another person.
If we use love only to describe an internal feeling, then perhaps a person can feel it while treating their partner terribly.
If we also understand love as a way of treating another person, then feelings alone are not enough.
The distinction matters because saying someone may have loved their partner can sometimes become a reason to minimize what that partner experienced. We can become so focused on whether the feelings were genuine that we overlook whether the relationship was safe, respectful, and reciprocal.
I don’t think we need to prove that someone never loved us before we are allowed to acknowledge that they hurt us.
And we don’t need to deny that someone may have complicated feelings before we can hold them accountable for their behaviour.
Maybe some people have learned a version of love shaped by possession, control, or the fear of losing someone. Maybe some people confuse attachment with intimacy, jealousy with care, or keeping someone close with treating them well. These are possibilities to consider, not conclusions we can draw about every person who causes harm.
Whatever the explanation, a relationship cannot become healthy simply because one person insists that their intentions are loving.
Someone’s intention to love you doesn’t erase the impact of how they treat you.
And if they genuinely want to build a healthier relationship, that intention has to become visible in their choices: in how they respond to boundaries, how they handle conflict, how they repair harm, and whether they change the behaviours that hurt the other person.
I don’t think love means never making a mistake. I think people can hurt each other, acknowledge it, learn from it, and do better.
But there is a difference between making a mistake and repeatedly making someone suffer for having feelings, boundaries, or needs of their own. There is a difference between conflict and control. There is a difference between being afraid of losing someone and treating that person as if they belong to you.
I am still learning how to define love for myself, partly because the people and experiences that have shaped my understanding of it have not always given me the same message.
Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to this question.
Not because I want to decide whether every person who hurts their partner is capable of love, but because I want to understand why we sometimes treat the existence of love as if it should settle every other question.
Maybe the more important question isn’t simply whether someone loves you.
Maybe it’s whether their understanding of love leaves room for you to be a person of your own: someone with feelings, boundaries, choices, and the freedom to disagree without being punished for it.
Because I can try to understand why someone behaves the way they do. I can acknowledge their feelings without dismissing their struggles. I can even believe that they sincerely want to love someone.
But I am learning that understanding someone is not the same as agreeing with them, and recognizing their intentions is not the same as accepting the consequences of their actions.
Perhaps love is not only about what we feel for another person. Perhaps it is also about what we are willing to take responsibility for when our feelings are not enough to keep us from hurting them.
