When ‘too much love’ is actually a wound: Understanding obsession in relationships

Some people love like they’re trying to keep a candle alive in a storm.

They text a lot. They check in constantly. They remember small details you forgot you ever shared. Their care can feel like warmth, until it feels like weight. And somewhere between “Aww” and “Arrey yaar”, you start wondering if their love is sweet, suffocating, or secretly something else.

Here’s a psychological truth that is both compassionate and inconvenient: overloving behaviour often comes from a place of lack. Not a lack of character. A lack of received love, consistent attention, emotional safety, or secure attachment. Sometimes people give you the love they wish someone had given them. Not because they want to burden you, but because they are trying to finally feel what was missing.

But, and this matters deeply, pain does not automatically make behaviour healthy. So let’s hold two truths at once: we can understand someone’s wounds without becoming the bandage that slowly tears our own skin.

When love becomes loud: the emotional mathematics of overlove

In coaching, I often say, “Love has a sound.” Healthy love is steady, not silent. Unhealthy love is loud, not deep. It announces itself because it is terrified of disappearing.

Overloving behaviour can look like obsession, but underneath, it often carries messages like:

• Please don’t forget me.
• Please don’t leave.
• Please choose me, repeatedly, loudly, daily.
• Please prove I matter.

In many Indian homes, love is not always spoken. Care is often expressed as duty. Food appears. Fees get paid. Sacrifices are made. But emotional language can be scarce. Many adults grow up with a strange hunger: materially held, emotionally unfed.

So when they finally love someone, they love with urgency. It’s not romance, it’s rescue. Not intimacy, it’s insurance.

The inner child who texts you at 2:17 am

I remember a client who said, “I don’t know why I panic when they don’t reply. I become small inside.” That one line held a whole childhood.

Often, the adult is holding the phone, but the inner child is holding the fear.

If someone grew up feeling invisible, they might overcompensate in adulthood by making you feel intensely seen. If they were emotionally neglected, they might become hypervigilant about losing closeness. Their nervous system learns: closeness can vanish at any time, so I must keep checking.

Psychologists call this anxious attachment. It is not a label to shame someone. It’s a pattern to understand. Anxious attachment often creates:

• constant reassurance-seeking
• fear of abandonment
• overthinking tone, timing, and silence
• difficulty self-soothing
• intense reactions to normal distance

So yes, sometimes they are trying to give you the importance they never got. But they are also trying to get you to become the proof that they are finally worthy of importance.

That’s a heavy role for any human.

Overcare, people-pleasing, and the fear of being ‘too much’

In India, many people are taught to be “good” by being useful. Love becomes a performance. If I care more, I’ll be valued more. If I give more, I’ll have less left.

So overcare can be a form of people-pleasing, wearing a sherwani of devotion.

They may not even know they are doing it. They genuinely believe love means merging, monitoring, and managing.

But love is not management. Love is presence.

And here’s the uncomfortable question society avoids: Do we confuse intensity with sincerity? We sometimes glorify the person who cannot breathe without the relationship, calling it “true love”. Bollywood made a fortune selling that confusion. The reality is harsher and kinder: healthy love allows oxygen to flow.

Love-Bombing vs Overloving: similar feelings, different meanings

Now, a necessary pause.

Not all excessive affection is innocent. Some people use attention as a strategy to overwhelm you. That is love-bombing, often linked to control, manipulation, or insecure power dynamics. It can begin like poetry and end like a police interrogation.

So how do you tell the difference between overloving behaviour and love-bombing?

Overloving behaviour usually has anxiety underneath. Love-bombing usually has an agenda beneath.

A simple test: When you set a boundary, what happens?

• A wounded but well-intentioned person may feel hurt, but they will try to learn.
• A controlling person will punish, guilt-trip, or escalate.

Boundaries reveal character.

Compassion without self-betrayal: the boundary that heals both

This is where many kind people get trapped. You don’t want to make them feel low for loving you. You don’t want to be cruel. You don’t want to become another person who “didn’t understand them”.

But compassion without boundaries becomes self-abandonment.

Here is a gentle truth: you can validate their feelings without validating every behaviour.

If someone texts you 27 times, it does not mean they are evil. It also does not mean you must reply 27 times to prove you are good.

In my own life, I’ve learned that clear communication is a form of kindness. The kindest people are not those who tolerate everything. They are those who tell the truth early, before resentment turns love into sarcasm.

Try language like:

I care about you. I also need space to focus and reset.
When I’m quiet, it doesn’t mean I’m leaving. It means I’m human.
Let’s find a rhythm that feels safe for both of us.

A relationship is not a rehabilitation centre. It can be healing, yes. But healing is a shared practice, not a one-sided job.

The real need behind the constant checking

If you look closely, the person who overcares is often asking one thing:

Am I safe with you?

And the partner who feels suffocated is asking one thing:

Am I free with you?

Healthy intimacy holds both safety and freedom.

If you are the one who overloves, the work is not to love less; it is to love more. The work is to self-soothe more. To build an inner home so you don’t keep renting emotional shelter from someone else’s replies.

If you are the one receiving this intensity, the work is not to shame them. The work is to be honest. To stop rewarding anxiety with instant reassurance and start rewarding maturity with steady closeness.

This is where yoga quietly enters. A yogic relationship is not about attachment disguised as devotion. It’s about connection without clinging. Presence without possession. Love that blesses, not binds.

Don’t make them small, but don’t shrink yourself either

Yes, some people are showing you the love they wish someone had shown them. And if you can, meet that with gentleness. Not mockery. Not coldness. Not performative superiority.

But remember this, too: wounded love can still wound.

So don’t make them feel low for loving you. And also, don’t make yourself low to carry love that has no boundaries.

Real love is not measured by how often someone checks in. It’s measured by whether both people become more peaceful, more honest, and more whole in each other’s presence.

That’s the love worth keeping.

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