Enemies of Love

The enemy of love is not temptation from outside.  The enemy is always within.  A successful couple has its immune system.  The world is full of diseases but not everyone will fall victim to them.  The world is full of temptations but not everyone is beguiled by them.  Happy people do not leave good relationships.

The enemies of love are not the attractive work colleague or the sexy fitness trainer, the drinking companions, the disputes with the partner’s friends or family.  These are just the viruses looking for something to infect.

The enemies of love are the forces within us that make us behave in unloving, neglectful or destructive ways.  The enemies of love are contempt and the many ways of showing it, habit and many ways of falling into it, inattentiveness and all the opportunities for intimacy and empathy that it misses. 

They are bad moods and the corrosive effect they have on other people, jealousy and its insatiable hunger for proof.  The enemies of love are constant criticism and its infinite self-justification, nagging and its stupid inability to change track, constant absence and the growing gulf it creates.

Where these agents are uncontrolled they are the death of love.  They work away inside a relationship until all an outsider has to do is knock at the door for the fortress is breached.

Anonymous