When Love Becomes Small
Love should lift, not shrink. It should feel like open air, not a locked room. And yet, there are times when affection becomes a cage—a measure of control disguised as care.
I have learned to notice the small ways love can diminish us: the subtle insistence on compliance masked as compromise, the quiet erosion of boundaries in the name of closeness, the unspoken rules that dictate how much of ourselves we are allowed to show.
It doesn’t always happen loudly. Sometimes it begins with small concessions—agreeing to let things go “just this once,” silencing a thought because you don’t want to start an argument, dimming your own excitement because you’re afraid it might overshadow theirs. At first, these choices feel like kindness. They feel like love.
But over time, you start to feel it—the tightening. The way your world becomes smaller, not because the walls moved in, but because you’ve been taught to take up less and less space inside it.
Real love does not require you to disappear. It does not ask you to forfeit your voice, your joy, or your freedom. Love is not meant to make you smaller—it is meant to hold space for all of you, even the parts that are messy, inconvenient, or difficult to understand.
If what you’re feeling is suffocation rather than safety, that is not love. That is something else. And learning the difference is part of the work of keeping yourself whole.
The love worth keeping will meet you where you are, without asking you to shave off pieces of yourself to fit. It will hand you the key to your own expanse and say, Go. Be everything you are. And when you do, that love will not feel threatened—it will stand in awe
