The Case Against Love — Possession, Projection, and the Beautiful Lie
I have thought a lot about love over the course of my life — what it means, what it feels like, why it is so consuming that even the wisest have wrecked themselves trying to understand it, arriving finally at nothing except silence. Perhaps that silence is the most honest thing ever said about love.
But in the waning light of February, I arrived at something else entirely.
Ishtar descended through seven gates to reach the underworld, and at each one she surrendered something she thought she needed — her crown, her jewels, her armour, her dignity. She arrived at the bottom stripped of everything. I understood her then.
I realised I did not love. I wanted to possess.
Not out of cruelty. But out of fear. Out of longing. Out of the belief that love meant holding, claiming, securing that what we love must become ours, that possession is proof.
But the waning Lovers exposes the lie.
Possession is not love. It is the shadow of love. Because love — real love — is the ultimate act of free will. To choose someone freely, wholly, despite their imperfections. To offer yourself without coercion or demand. To give what you could withhold. That is profound. And yet I found myself wanting to cage what I had given freely. To hold what was never mine to keep. To secure what was meant to breathe.
The waning Lovers asks the uncomfortable questions — where did I confuse longing with ownership? Where did I fall in love with a possibility instead of a person? Where did I want someone to fill a space I hadn't filled myself?
This is the descent. The emotional winter. The moment the fantasy dies so the truth can live.
Love, in its human form, is dangerous. Not because it wounds but because it reveals. And sometimes the revelation is this:
I wanted to be loved more than I wanted to love.
That is the shadow. That is the unraveling. That is the necessary fall.
