Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Think about the last time you felt a flash of something ugly when someone you love made a plan that did not include you. Not the argument that followed — just that first half-second. What exactly was it defending?
It was defending the idea that you own the other person. It was a tiny, sharp reflex to protect a sense of property. Think about a woman who wants to be loved for her mind. She wants you to see her thoughts and her character.
But she also has a dark suspicion. She suspects that her partner is actually only interested in her body. To cope with that, she forces herself to believe they are "happy together." She creates a story where they are a perfect match, even though they aren't.
She is lying to herself to avoid the truth of how he actually sees her. This is a way of hiding from the reality of the situation. If she admits he doesn't value her mind, then the relationship loses its face. So she chooses a fiction.
It’s a lie that feels like a truth because it’s easier to live in than the alternative. This is what happens when we try to turn a human being into a thing we can keep. When we treat a person like an object, we strip away their ability to be anything other than what we want them to be. We want them to be a constant.
We want them to be a fixed point in our lives. But a person is not a chair. You can't own the way a chair functions or how it looks. You can only own the chair itself.
When you try to do that with a person, you aren't actually loving who they are. You are just trying to hold onto a thought of them. And this is the part worth stealing. If you get this wrong, you aren't just being "passionate."
You are being destructive. You are trying to take away the very thing that makes them human: their freedom. We are going to look at why that happens and what it actually costs us.
Think about the objects in your house. You might have a favorite chair or a well-worn book. When you love those things, you love them for what they actually are. You love the chair because of how it holds your weight, or the specific way the fabric feels.
You love the book for the way it functions as a container for a story. You are loving the real qualities of the object. You own the chair, and because you own it, you can appreciate its truth. But you cannot do that with a person.
You cannot own someone else’s character. You cannot own their ability to be brave, or their sense of humor, or the way they think. Because you cannot own those things, what happens when you say you "possess" someone? "When we possess an object, the love for the object is the genuine love because you love it for what it is. For its quality whether that be its function, aesthetics, or its meaning.
But when you think you possess a person, it is not the quality of the person that you want to possess but rather the thought that you are capable of possessing a person."What I mean by this is that when we try to "own" a partner, we aren't actually falling in love with who they are. We are falling in love with a power fantasy. We are in love with the idea that we can make another human being a permanent fixture of our own lives.
We want them to be a constant, a piece of furniture that doesn't move or change its mind. But a person who can change their mind is, by definition, not a piece of furniture. If you try to hold onto them as a possession, you have to ignore the very thing that makes them a person. You have to ignore their agency—their ability to make their own choices and act on them.
To treat a person as a possession is to treat them as a passive object. It is a way of saying they don't have a will of their own. This is where we run into a problem that a philosopher named Jean-Paul Sartre spent a lot of time worrying about. He was bothered by the way people lie to themselves to avoid the terrifying reality of their own lives.
He called this bad faith, which is just a fancy way of saying we pretend we don't have a choice so we don't have to feel responsible for our actions. Think about how that works in a relationship. If you decide that your partner belongs to you, you don't have to deal with the anxiety of their freedom. If they belong to you, they can't suddenly decide they don't love you anymore.
They can't decide to leave. They can't change. By turning them into a possession, you are trying to freeze time. You are trying to escape the fact that they are a free being who could, at any second, choose a different path.
You might think this is just a technicality. You might think that saying "I love you" is enough. But if your love is built on the need to own, then your love is actually a cage. You aren't looking at the person in front of you.
You are looking at a ghost of your own making. You are looking at a version of them that you have captured and put on a shelf. And this is the part worth stealing: if you can't handle the fact that they are free, you aren't actually loving them. You are just trying to manage your own fear of being alone.
My gut feeling compels me to feel disgust from within every time I hear someone say something like, "he's mine," or "she belongs to me." What's wrong with that? Two things: first, to think that a person can be possessed is to reduced the person to a mere passive object that does not have its own agency. By doing so, you're reducing a person to a mere object that cannot think, feel, and have its own sense of active ownership of its own existence.
Think about the way you handle a person who works with you, or even someone you are close to in your private life. There is a specific moment where you stop seeing them as a person with a life and start seeing them as a tool to get a result. It happens when you stop asking what they need and start demanding what they do. You start to treat their output as your property.
You assume that because you hired them, or because you love them, their time and their focus belong to you. This is where the danger lies. When you treat a person as a possession, you stop being a partner and start being a manager of a ghost. You aren't actually interacting with their skills or their personality anymore.
You are interacting with your own requirements. If you find yourself getting angry because someone isn't meeting a standard in the exact way you envisioned it, you have to ask yourself a hard question. Are you upset because they are failing, or are you upset because they are exercising their freedom to be different than your image of them? Most of us don't admit this.
We tell ourselves we are just being "efficient" or "passionate." But if you look closely at the friction, it usually comes from a desire for control. You want them to be a reliable gear in your machine. But a gear is an object.
A person is a living thing that can choose to stop turning. "Human beings are free, and being free is the essence of human species. Second, to possess a person is to think that a person is no longer having a freedom to see you in a different light. That person cannot love you less, and also cannot love you more. True."
I mean that the moment you try to "own" someone's loyalty, you lose the very thing that makes that loyalty valuable. If they are forced to stay, or if they are conditioned to act a certain way, it isn't a choice. It's just a reflex. It's like a puppet moving because you pulled a string.
It isn't a relationship. The real test is how you react when they choose something else. If their freedom to walk away feels like a personal insult, then you weren't looking for a person. You were looking for a trophy.
You were looking for the comfort of a cage. The goal is to want them to stay because they choose to, even though they always could. That is the only way to love someone without trying to destroy them.
But often, make no mistake about it, calling a human being "my XXX" is nothing less than a pretentious self-fulfilling way of lying to oneself that one has a socially acceptable reason to engage in a legitimate sexual intercourse, when, in most case, there is nothing legitimate about it precisely because of how one sees the other as a mere "possess-able" object. Any attempt to make something external to the dignified nature of human species will subvert itself. What I mean is that we use language to cover up a deep, uncomfortable truth. We say "mine" because we want to feel like we have a right to someone else's body or their time.
We want a social excuse for the fact that we are trying to treat a human being like a piece of furniture. But the moment you do that, you lose the very thing that makes the person worth loving in the first place. You're trying to build a house on a foundation of lies. So, we have to look at the cost of this.
If we eventually succeed in making someone "ours," we have succeeded only in making them a ghost. We have traded a real, breathing, unpredictable person for a comfortable, static image. But here is the question that keeps me up: if we strip away all our desires to own, to protect, and to claim one another, what is left of the bond? If love is not possession, and it is not the security of a cage, can we ever truly feel safe enough to let someone stay?
Or is the only honest way to love someone to live in a constant, beautiful state of letting them go?