7 Things “I Love You” Doesn’t Mean

7 Things “I Love You” Doesn’t Mean

Love is a word that is thrown around a lot. It’s a beautiful feeling and essentially, love makes the world go round. It takes time to develop a true and sustainable love but it’s worth it when you have it in your life.

In romantic love, there can be confusion about this feeling. The three fundamental components of love are trust, honesty, and respect. When those components are constantly stomped on by your significant other, this leads to a lot of doubt that love is real. When someone pledges their love to you, there are seven things they should never do. Even if they still tell you they love you, it may just be a weapon they know to use in order to keep you. You can call them deal-breakers, or whatever you want, but when they occur, you have to ask yourself if their love is worth the pain.

1. Cheating Behind Your Back

Cheating is a complex web that can have many reasons attached to it. Maybe it comes from boredom in the relationship, or maybe your partner just can’t commit to one person. Cheating is bad enough, but when it’s done for long periods of time behind your back, there’s also dishonesty. Communication has been lost and they’re living a life that you have no idea about. If you find out and they beg you to stay and tell you they still love you, this is questionable.


2. Lying About Nearly Everything

When you’re constantly told lies, something will eventually give. It may take some time to realize that you’re being lied to by the person who says they love you. Just like cheating, they are disrespecting you. They don’t trust that you can handle who they really are.

One of the things they’ll say in defense when you approach them is that they love you. Being that a chronic liar doesn’t feel good enough about themselves to be real about who they are, they need you. So yes, they are dependent on you, but only until you call them out. They will beg you for a while, and give you false promises, but in the end they’ll ghost you out of embarrassment.

3. Physical Abuse

People that choose physical abuse may in fact truly love you. The issue is that this love is extremely painful, stressful, and destructive. You will have to contort yourself to try to please your abuser, and may even start to crave the aftermath of a violent bout. Once your partner has calmed down after abusing you, you will be showered with more love than you can imagine.


Love may be there in moments, but there is also a lot of anger and intent to harm. This is not what a long, healthy, and loving relationship should ever be based on. They don’t really love you because they don’t love themselves.

4. Mental Abuse

When your partner insults you in public or behind closed doors, this is often even more painful and confusing than physical abuse. The pain you feel in your heart when your partner puts you down is real. They are breaking you down until you can’t feel anything, and they do this for the purpose of keeping you with them. Your self esteem gets so low, you separate yourself from those who really love you, and feel that you’re not good enough for something better.

This is not the image you had of love when you dreamed about it as a child. That’s because it really isn’t. Even if they really love you some of the time, they tend to use the word love more to keep you than anything else.


5. Guilt Trips

When your partner makes you feel guilty about making them feel badly, they aren’t taking responsibility for their own actions. If they are jealous, they may work hard to make you feel badly because you talked to someone else. They may make their depression, anger, or any other negative emotion your fault. Anyone who goes out of their way to manipulate you into feeling guilty is full of cruel intentions. They will destroy your days when they’re having bad days. If something good happens, they probably won’t be thanking you either. If you do get angry, they will likely fall back and tell you that they just love you so much, they worry about losing you. It’s their easy out when things aren’t going their way.

6. Withholding Intimacy

As a way of punishing you for making them feel badly, your partner may withhold intimacy as a way to hurt you. It’s understandable if they’re not in the mood after a fight. However, when you’ve made up, everything seems fine and they still won’t kiss you, hug you, or be intimate, they’re probably still angry. Instead of dealing with the issue and communicating, they will withhold loving gestures in order to continue punishing you.

They are manipulating you so that you never hurt them that way again. They will likely withhold any kind words as well. You may have to beg or suck up for a long time in order to hear the words, “I love you” again.


7. Silent Treatment for Weeks

When someone that says they love you won’t make eye contact or talk to you for weeks at a time, it’s extremely hurtful. They know that they’re hurting you. Part of their personality has made this such an ingrained habit, that even if they wanted to break the silence, they wouldn’t know how to. You are left completely helpless. If you try to get them to talk, this will make the period of silence even longer.

It is suggested that you just ignore them back, but this makes life very tense, and now you’re learning how to keep silence, a weapon you hadn’t used before. Maybe there is love in the relationship, but is it worth getting the silent treatment every time there’s a disagreement between you?

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Loraine Couturier

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[3] Mother For Life: Oxytocin’s Role
[4] Psychology Today: Facebook and Your Brain
[5] Alex Korb: The Upward Spiral

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