If you’re really in love with someone, you don’t enable their harmful behavior.
If pursuing someone you’re in love with means in any way enabling their harm of you/others/themselves, that’s not love – it’s codependence. Truly being in capital-L Love means wanting everyone’s highest good.
I get it. I used to let people harm the fuck out of me (and themselves, and others) because I was “in love” with them. I understand this mistake and I empathize. But since we’re on the subject, let us state for the record: that is not what being in love is.
I went so far as to bail a dude out of jail on a felony charge for a business I advised him to shut down MONTHS prior (he ignored me) and to financially support him for over a year until he started breaking my furniture and (briefly) tried to kill me. I get it. I thought showing “unconditional support” was what it meant to “love hard.” Bullshit. Everyone got hurt. Me, him, everyone involved. Love, real love, would have been to walk away when he didn’t listen to my warnings, to model what it would have looked like to save myself and let the others follow or not. But I chose to trust him blindly when in reality I knew better, and I let being “in love” with him override my better judgment, because I thought that love meant compliance.
You’re going to let someone act the fool because of your own selfish fear of losing them if you don’t play along, and then you’re going to say it’s because you’re in love with them? Miss me with that shit, and get Love’s name out of your mouth.
You’ve gotta be the lighthouse. It’s the only way. Let people join you in Love or not. Don’t anchor yourself to their sinking ship and think you’re doing anybody any favors. The world needs you. Stand on the shore and shine the light leading home. That’s it.
I know I existed for years in that fucked up paradigm but from where I am now, man, it’s just so easy to mind your own business and stay in your integrity, I don’t know why more people don’t do it.