Name: When People Turn Down Love
Uploaded: 2026-02-04T17:03:28.000Z
Duration: 5 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

The arrival of love should ostensibly always be a matter of celebration.

Let's imagine that finally, after years of waiting, along comes what might be called a nice person.

They're mature, they apologise for their flaws.

They listen, they ask questions, they take an interest, they're generous.

So a new couple go on a number of holidays.

Maybe to Pisa first, then a weekend in Wales, then a trip to Nottingham.

From the training course, to an aunt, to a brother in law.

There's laughs, some innovative sex, deep conversations and a sense at last of having come home.

But in the background of one of the two parties, the lover who is fearful of love, there will also be a rising discomfort.

This is managed through strategic lowerings of the temperature.

Let's say there's an argument on the steps of the museum, which ruins one afternoon.

Then there's a mysterious bout of so called illness which puts pay to a few dinners.

Then there's an urgent need to see a friend, which shatters the intimacy of the third weekend.

Then there's a pressing need to attend a course or fix a shelf.

Subtle attempts to ensure that love cannot deepen, that dependence is stymied.

That a home is carefully dismantled at the same time as it seems to be being put up.

A person is taken prisoner early in their life.

In the prison camp there's barely any food.

The young prisoner grows up having to adjust to an extreme calorie controlled diet.

There's little nourishment and the stomach shrinks to accommodate what's on offer.

There are chocolate tarts, creamy cheeses, lush fruits, dried meats.

But the banquet is wholly indigestible to the prisoners.

Something comparable will have happened to the lover who cannot love.

They too will have been neglected by a mother who was mentally unwell, or a father who was filled with rage and then later ran off or married a friend.

The lover's emotional stomach has shrunk.

Gradually, a conclusion forms in the emotionally undernourished partner's mind.

Their lover is not, despite appearances, very nice at all.

They don't have their best interests at heart.

They aren't actually interested in listening to them.

These accusations bear the imprint of their opposites.

They can be read as desperate, confused pleas on the part of the unwell lover's unconscious mind.

What on earth is one meant to do with kindness?

What in heaven's name is one meant to do with trust?

These are desirable but entirely alien properties and they kick off an acute unconscious fear of loss.

What would happen if the lover were to be snatched away?

Better then to instigate loss oneself than see it unfold hideously outside of one's volition.

To prevent dependence growing, the lover who is terrified of love sets about priming the explosives.

An affair, a grave rupture of trust, a disappearance, a cancelled holiday, silence online.

Were they to be questioned by the incensed, terrified partner?

In a classic so called avoidant discard, the lover can blow up a relationship in a matter of days, sometimes hours.

Social media profiles are changed instantly.

The lover who's afraid of love may be back on the dating scene in minutes.

The now ex is erased from history, airbrushed out like a Soviet era leader.

It takes a very steady mind indeed not to fracture at this point.

When one's on the receiving end of this, one's being told to go away on the grounds of something one's not done by someone one adores, who's denying that they're up to anything.

We've been discarded because love is terrifying to those who were not loved as children.

We have been thrown away not because we were horrible, but because we were not horrible enough.

We've been punished for caring for people who do not in their core in any way feel worthy of care.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

When People Turn Down Love

subtle

intimacy

matter

unconscious