Humanity has always seen love as something akin to possession. If someone was not in your possession, then you did not have the right to love that person. Even if possession has been linked to love throughout history, this link is not normal, especially since one has nothing to do with the other.
Possession has always been about private property, and therefore has followed the behavior specific to the attitude towards goods. This, obviously, cannot bring good things, because interpersonal relationships require moral attitudes, respect, fairness, etc. but the relationship towards properties does not require any of that.
If we look a few hundred years ago, we will see a lot of horrors taking place because of the association of love with property. Namely, women and children had no place in society unless they were under someone’s property. Moreover, because only men had property rights, he could use his wife and children for his own purposes exactly as using or sharing goods. Some enslaved their children; some prostituted their wives for money, and so on.
Even though mankind has tried to get over that way of thinking, we have not yet managed to see love as something separate from the right to property. Many of us no longer love a person if that person has ceased to serve our interests. And this fact shows that what we call love has never been love, but a joy that someone pleases us, meets our expectations and does not destroy our personal image. Once one of these things ceases to be fulfilled, people usually begin to hate the person they said they have loved for a lifetime.
So how can we stop loving someone just because they don’t do what we want them to do? If this happens, it means that it was never about love but about the pleasure of feeling that someone is a good piece of the puzzle that builds our perfect image.
To help you understand what I am talking about, I will give some examples.
Was it love or possession?
One example is about love of a parent for their child. A BBC study says that many parents turn away from their children because their children live a life that does not respect their personal principles. Two mothers stopped talking to their children: one because her children did not always tell the truth; and another because her daughter seemed to be attached to a man.
It is important to mention in these examples that these parents have never seen their children as separate persons, as someone who have their own lives and make personal decisions. These parents saw their children as personal projects that have not gone as planned as they expected and that’s why they chose to abandon them. This case shows that these parents did not loved in the proper sense of word their children not even when they talked. A parent who loves his child loves him no matter what he wants to be in life, he loves him because love is about loving the persons as they are, not about totally matching the children’s decisions with the parents’ expectations.
This kind of estrangement is very common in society. A study by Stand Alone shows that at least one in five British families is going through this process. And an American study shows that in the US 10% of mothers are estranged from at least one of their adult children. The results are even more overwhelming for the students, who almost 40% go through this process of estrangement from families for reasons such as: different values and principles, different life plans, different religion, falling in love with a person that parents do not like, etc.
Another example of love is that between two people. Following the people who got to divorce, we will understand that many of those who were married did not truly loved each other. If once they break up they do not talk to each other, the thing they called love was nothing more than a sent o pleasure that the person they were with fulfilled their needs.
There are a few cases where divorced people continue to be friends, to help and talk to each other, to care for each other even though they have separate lives. Still, these cases are rare, but they are about true love, in which the two have accepted that they do not find happiness together, but do not hate each other because things are as they are.
Usually, if one does not feel happy in the relationship and wants to get out of it, the two lovers end up hating each other: the first because the other did not fight for love, and the other that he fought alone for things to go well or because it was never listened to and understood. In cases where one leaves the relationship because he is happy with someone else and the other is angry because of that, we talk about possessiveness. It is clear that the first did not wanted that person to be happy without him, but for sure he wanted that person for himself for his happiness no matter about the happiness of the other. But careful, if we love someone, but if that person is happy with someone else, if our love stops because that person is with another person we should realize that it was never about love but about the desire to possess that person and the selfishness of us being happy no matter the other person’s feelings. To understand better, I will draw a parallel with the feeling of possession of an object.
When we have a car we enjoy it when we drive, but when we sell it we don’t care about it anymore because it belongs to another person and we care about our new car.
History has marked us enormously in human relationships, the way we build our families and the way we see happiness. Because love has been associated with man’s possession, it is still difficult for us to love without having a tendency to possess the person we love.
Finally, love without possession means appreciation for a person and its way of being regardless of whether that person is with us, does things differently from us or feels the same for us. Love without possession means to be happy for someone’s happiness, to be reconciled with the joy of that person even if that happiness was not conditioned by us. After all, love means overcoming the instincts of possession and enjoying someone just because of their way of being, that is, to be pious.
Sources:
Buxton J. (1996). “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”: Postmodernism and Possession. Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, vol.22, no.2, 199-219.
Frost R., Gross R. (1993). The hoarding of possessions. Behaviour research and therapy, vol.31, no.4, 367-381.
Hall L. B. (1983). Jorge Amado: Women, Love, and Possession. Southwest Review, 66-77.
Hartwell- Walker M. (2016). Signs of a controlling guy. PsychCentral, psychcentral.com/lib/signs-of-a-controlling-guy#1.
Lastovicka J., Anderson L. (2014). Loneliness, Material Possession Love, and Consumers’ Physical Well-Being. In Tatzel M., Consumption and Well-Being in the Material World. Dordrecht: Springer.
Litwinski L. (1942). Is there an Instinct of Possession. British Journal of Psychology, vol. 33, no. 1.
Ro Christine. (2019). The truth about family estrangement. BBC, Future, bbc.com/future/article/20190328-family-estrangement-causes.
Rosengarten R. (2007). An impossible love: subjection and embodiment in Paula Rego’s possession. Art History, vol. 30, no.1, 83-103.