Everyone (Probably) Loves You, But Not Everyone’s Love Can Reach You

Existential Insecurity, Epistemic Fear, and the Maturity of Liberated Love

People love you.

Almost everyone does.
But they can only love you through their own worldview and traumas, and not every world can hold you.

You do not have to accept the perspective I just shared with you wholesale, if you feel like your parents, church, ex girlfriend/boyfriend, etc truly hated you, that's valid, and I won't try to convince you otherwise, because I believe in honoring the knowing of others, and the end result is the same.

Love that can't hold you is worthless to you.

That’s the ache beneath so many ruptures we call “miscommunication,” “difference in values,” or “growing apart.”

What’s actually happening is called "existential insecurity".

It's the quiet panic that arises when someone close to us begins to live, think, or be in a way that threatens the coherence of our own worldview.

A few examples:

• If you're a homophobic Christian that believes everyone is supposed to be straight, and your child is gay, that child's mere existence is a threat to your worldview. And vice versa.
• If you're an ontological pluriversalist (There are many real worlds, each revealing truth from where it stands, and we learn reality by being in relationship among them), and someone close to you is an ontological absolutist (There’s only one real world, and mine is it), your belief is a threat to their worldview. And vice versa.
• If you're a post-theist (Divinity isn’t a being to believe in or reject, it’s the living mystery that moves through everything once belief itself is outgrown), and someone close to you is an atheist, theist, spiritual, religious, or spiritual but not religious, then your beliefs are a threat to their worldview. And vice versa.
• If you’re a patriarchal man who believes leadership is a male birthright, and your partner no longer asks for permission, their autonomy feels like rebellion.
• If you’re a capitalist who’s built your identity around success and your friend decides that joy matters more than money, their peace feels like an accusation.
• If you’re a religious person who believes only your faith grants salvation, and your sibling finds God outside your doctrine, their freedom reads as betrayal.
• If you’re a parent who sees obedience as love, and your adult child starts telling the truth, their honesty feels like disrespect.
• If you see balance and tension where loved ones see contradiction and irrationality and chaos, your presence feels like a threat to their need for certainty.
• If you’re a monogamist who equates exclusivity with worth, and your partner becomes ethically non-monogamous, their expansion feels like abandonment.
• If you’re a scientist who treats data as the only path to truth, and your friend speaks from embodied or ancestral knowing, their certainty sounds like delusion.
• If you’re a gender-essentialist who believes manhood and womanhood are fixed, and your coworker transitions, their existence feels like chaos.
• and vice versa and so on.

This is part of why Abrahamic religion subscriber's might disown their own child and/or kick them out for being gay or trans or not being a believer.

When someone’s reality shifts spiritually, politically, cosmologically (how they believe reality is organized...where we come from, what holds us together, and what all of this means), it doesn’t just challenge our opinions... it shakes the ground of our being.

Our nervous system doesn’t distinguish between “they think differently now” and “the world as I knew it is dying.”

So we grasp for control.

We debate, convert, moralize, withdraw, or even cut people off.

We mistake their transformation for betrayal, because if their map no longer matches ours, maybe our map was never safe.

I’ve watched people I love flinch at my joy because it didn’t match their map. That’s when I realized love, to them, was something I had to fit inside.

The Death of Shared Reality

I posit that every deep relationship rests on three invisible forms of safety:

1. Epistemic Trust – (We can know together).
2. Ontological Safety – (My being isn’t up for debate here).
3. Ethical Reciprocity – (We can care for each other without control).

When someone’s worldview evolves, these cords start to tremble.

If I no longer trust how you make meaning, can I still feel understood?

If your beliefs make my identity feel precarious, can I still feel safe in your presence?

If care becomes correction, can it still be love?

Most relationships falter here, not because affection disappears, but because our shared infrastructure of meaning collapses. The other’s evolution exposes the fragility of our own coherence.

Cutting People Off as an Attempt to Bend Them Toward Your Worldview

Some people will cut off or disown family members or their own children for various reasons...while secretly hoping they'll magically change and run back.

They’re so existentially insecure...that shaky, unbearable sense that if you keep being who you are, their world might collapse...that they convince themselves the only way to get you back is to kick you out.

They tell themselves you’ll ‘learn your lesson,’ ‘come to your senses,’ ‘crawl back home.’”

More often than not it never works especially if its something pretty inherent and static to a person.

They’ll disown a child, exile a sibling, or freeze out a loved one, not because they’ve truly accepted the separation, but because they believe the distance itself is leverage.

It’s punishment disguised as principle.

Most people don’t come crawling back from exile. They grow roots in the wilderness. They don't forget what you did to them when they needed you the most. They find community, acceptance, and love elsewhere and thrive without you in their lives.

That’s the secret no one says out loud...control isn’t the opposite of love, it’s love afraid of dying.

When Love Becomes a Function of Fear

What looks like cruelty is often fear in disguise.

Fear that the world we built together is ending.

Fear that goodness depends on sameness.

Fear that difference means disloyalty.

So we cling tighter. To religion, to ideology, to moral frameworks that promise security.

We call this control “care,” but it’s really self-preservation.
We’re trying to rescue ourselves from the vertigo of change.

This is existential insecurity... the heart’s resistance to evolution.

When it drives love, affection becomes surveillance.

Intimacy becomes a battleground for epistemic dominance.

And love, in its desperation, mutates into violence.

Everyone Loves You, But Not All Love Can Reach You

Here’s the complicated truth... most people do love you.

They’re simply loving you through their own framework (their faith, their trauma, their worldview, their nervous system.)

A devout Christian who says, “I love you but can’t affirm your life(style),” isn’t necessarily lying. They genuinely feel love, just love bound by their metaphysics.
Their affection is real to them, but incoherent to you. It cannot reach across worlds.

But I think we've all heard the saying, "There's no hate like Christian love". This touches on the exact phenomenon I'm trying to explain.

That’s what happens when love passes through the filter of domination, fear, or hierarchy.

It becomes care that erases, protection that controls, intimacy that depends on your compliance.

It is love trapped in the grammar of its own conditioning.

So yes, they (probably) love you.

No, that doesn’t mean you are safe/comfortable with them.

And yes, that means their love, in its current form, is meaningless to your liberation.

Love, Power, and the Limits of Humanization

The most haunting example of this truth is chattle slavery.

Many enslavers claimed to love the people they owned.

They grieved their deaths, bestowed gifts, sometimes even believed the enslaved “part of the family.”

But this was not love, it was possession disguised as affection, a psychological salve for the conscience of a dominator.

As bell hooks reminds us in All About Love, love is not a feeling.

Love is an ethic of freedom and justice.

It is the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual growth.

It cannot coexist with ownership or oppression.

Under hooks’ definition, the enslaver’s affection was not love but spiritual malpractice...sentiment used to anesthetize guilt while maintaining power.
It was emotional self-absolution within a death system.

Afropessimism (the perspective that anti-Blackness isn’t just racism, it’s the foundation of the whole world’s idea of “being human,” which means Black people are treated as outside humanity itself, no matter how society changes), pushes this even further. Thinkers like Frank B. Wilderson III and Saidiya Hartman show that the very category of “Human” was built through the exclusion of Blackness.

Within that structure, the idea of “humanizing your oppressor” is incoherent, because the grammar of human itself is parasitic.

From that vantage, to demand that the oppressed love or forgive those who dehumanize them is to reenact violence.

It asks the dead to empathize with the hand that killed them.

It confuses moral performance for transcendence.

Thus, when we ask whether enslavers loved the enslaved, or whether the oppressed can love their oppressors, the answer depends on which worldview we are in.

Inside domination, “love” is often just the emotional lubricant of control.
Inside liberation, love begins only once domination ends.

bell hooks saw love and justice as the same thing... one private, one public.

Afropessimism cautions that justice cannot be achieved using the oppressor’s grammar.

Together, they guide us toward a third path...one where love is not sentiment or salvation but coherence...the willingness to honor another’s freedom, even when that freedom ends the relationship.

From existential insecurity (the fear that another’s evolution undoes our own coherence) to Afropessimism (the recognition that love cannot exist within domination), a pattern emerges....love matures as our epistemic and ontological safety evolve.

When Love Meets Its Own Limit

This is where so many relationships falter.
The diverging one feels punished for evolving.
The anchored one feels abandoned by evolution.
Both are grieving the death of a shared cosmos.

What’s needed here isn’t persuasion but meta-trust... trust that truth itself is sacred, even when our truths diverge.

Trust that love can hold paradox without turning it into hierarchy.

Trust that letting go can also be an act of care.

Not every love is meant to survive transformation.

Some are meant to midwife it.

Sometimes, the highest form of love is release...letting each person belong fully to their own becoming.

The Maturity of Liberated Love

Liberated love is unsentimental.

It doesn’t cling to sameness or confuse control with devotion.

It recognizes that real intimacy doesn’t require agreement, only presence, humility, and consent.

When you understand this, you stop craving incoherent love.

You stop negotiating your truth in exchange for belonging.

You start measuring love not by its intensity, but by its capacity to keep you free.

Everyone may love you...even those trapped in systems of domination, even those whose “love” has caused you pain.

But only some love is built to reach you.

Only love that recognizes your full humanity, that honors your sovereignty and evolution, can truly hold you.

The rest is love still learning what love actually means.

The task of our time isn’t to find love that agrees with us, but to cultivate love that evolves with us, love that is not afraid to die and be reborn in freedom.

After the Collapse: Learning to Love Across Worlds

When the shared reality between two people collapses, it feels like death because, in a way, it is.

The world you built together, the one where both of your truths could coexist without too much friction, disintegrates.

The rituals of understanding that once made love feel safe stop working.

You can no longer meet each other through the same door.

But this collapse doesn’t have to mean the end of love. It can mark the end of a certain kind of love...love built on sameness, agreement, or unconscious hierarchy...and the beginning of a different form: love rooted in freedom, humility, and coherence.

To love across worlds, you have to stop trying to convert people into your worldview.

You have to release the fantasy that understanding requires agreement, or that safety depends on sameness.

You learn to practice what I call meta-trust...the faith that truth itself is alive and evolving, and that you don’t need to hold the whole truth to be in right relationship with it.

Meta-trust means I can love you without needing you to mirror me.

It means I can witness your transformation without making it about my own survival.

It means I can say, “I don’t understand, but I honor that this is true for you,” and mean it.

When you start to love this way, you stop measuring love by emotional proximity and start measuring it by coherence...by whether the relationship supports both people’s integrity and evolution.

You stop forcing reconciliation where divergence is sacred.

You stop mistaking comfort for connection.

Sometimes that looks like staying in contact but redefining closeness.
Sometimes it looks like space, distance, or even silence, but not as punishment. As respect. As trust that the sacred doesn’t need to be micromanaged.

Loving across worlds asks us to grieve the death of the old map, and to learn new languages of care that don’t depend on control.

It’s not sentimental or heroic. It’s slow, mature, and unglamorous. It’s the quiet decision to keep your heart open while releasing the demand to be understood.

This kind of love doesn’t erase difference, it reveres it.

It knows that worlds can touch without merging, that liberation doesn’t always mean reconciliation, and that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to let another person’s freedom unfold beyond the reach of your comprehension.

Writing this now, far from home, I realize that liberation doesn’t mean building walls around your truth. It means building enough inner ground that you can stand in love without losing yourself to the ebbs and flow of human differences and tensions.