I Still Believe in Love. I Just Don’t Trust It Anymore.
- Damien Blaauw
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
I have always been drawn to music. As a child I found comfort and beauty in it. I always had a knack of understanding the lyrics irrespective of the composition or structure of the music itself. I not only heard, but felt the music and it shaped me in more ways than I would care to admit. It was like I could tap into the artist's happiness, sadness, pain or ecstacy, and as I got older, music had a more profound effect on me. I can truly say that there was and even now, is music for every mood I have.
One song in particular that I can say I grew up with is Jesse Powell's "You", God rest his soul. There’s a reason this song hits me so deeply as a Pisces, and it isn’t just astrology or sentimentality. It’s wiring.
People like me experience what psychologists call emotional intensity bias. Emotions don’t register as mild data points, they arrive amplified. Love doesn’t feel pleasant, it feels significant. Loss doesn’t feel sad, it feels existential. This bias isn’t a flaw. It’s a sensitivity dial turned all the way up, but it means love is never casual. It’s immersive.
That immersion explains why surrender feels natural. In reality, when I place my heart in someone’s hands, I’m engaging in idealized attachment. This happens when we don’t just love a person, we love what they represent. Safety. Redemption. Home. The brain fills in gaps with hope. We see not only who they are, but who we believe they could be. Neptune would call this dreaming. Psychology calls it projection.
The fact is, projection is intoxicating. It allows love to feel limitless, but it also blinds us to incompatibility. We aren’t loving the reality in front of us. We’re loving a future we’ve mentally rehearsed.
The soothing presence described in the lyrics taps into coregulation, a nervous system phenomenon where one person becomes the emotional stabilizer for another. It's when someone’s voice, touch, or presence calms your anxiety, your body begins associating them with safety. Over time, this can slip into emotional reliance, especially for those of us who’ve spent years self-soothing alone. Love stops being a connection and starts becoming a coping mechanism.
Sadly, that’s where things quietly tilt.
Pisces energy leans toward enmeshment, a relational pattern where emotional boundaries blur. You don’t just care about the relationship, you absorb it. Their moods become your moods. Their distance feels like abandonment. Their approval feels like oxygen. From the outside, it looks like devotion. Internally, it’s nervous system overinvestment.
Then life happens!
Repeated disappointment triggers what’s known as protective cognition. After enough emotional injuries, the brain recalibrates. You don’t stop believing in love. You start observing it. Analyzing it. Turning it into a concept rather than an experience. This is how love shifts from reality into ideology. The heart steps back. The mind steps forward.
Let's not forget, there’s also confirmation bias at play. Once love hurts deeply enough, the mind starts collecting evidence to support caution. Every failed relationship becomes proof that love is beautiful but unreliable. The belief isn’t irrational. It’s adaptive. It keeps you functional.
The repetition in the song mirrors another phenomenon: attachment reinforcement. Repeating “I just wanna be yours” creates emotional certainty through language. The brain uses repetition to reduce anxiety, much like mantras or prayers. It’s an attempt to stabilize something that feels precious but fragile.
And this is where Pisces evolution happens.
The early version of me confused intensity with depth. Surrender with intimacy. Faith with safety. The later version understands secure attachment requires reciprocity, boundaries, and emotional regulation on both sides. Love cannot survive on depth alone. It needs structure.
So when I say I now see love more as ideology than reality, it’s not bitterness. It’s integration. I’ve learned to hold the dream without letting it consume me. To appreciate love’s beauty without offering my entire nervous system as collateral.
Astrology gave me the capacity to love deeply. Psychology taught me how not to disappear while doing it.
That’s the bow.
Not the loss of love.The refinement of it. Ciao! Damien
Glossary of Psychological Terms
Emotional Intensity Bias
A tendency to experience emotions more strongly and vividly than average. Feelings are not mild signals but immersive states. Love feels consuming. Loss feels destabilizing. This bias is common in highly sensitive individuals and those with high emotional awareness.
Attachment Theory
A psychological framework explaining how early relational experiences shape how we bond in adulthood. It influences how we give love, seek closeness, respond to distance, and handle emotional security.
Idealized Attachment
A form of attachment where a person becomes emotionally bonded not just to who someone is, but to what they symbolize. Safety, healing, rescue, or completion are projected onto the partner, often bypassing real-world incompatibilities.
Projection
A psychological process where internal needs, desires, or unresolved emotions are unconsciously placed onto another person. In romantic contexts, this often appears as seeing potential instead of reality.
Dopamine-Driven Attachment
An early-stage bonding response where attraction is reinforced by novelty, anticipation, and emotional reward. The brain fixates on details, amplifies pleasure, and narrows focus, creating an intense sense of connection.
Coregulation
A nervous system process where one person’s emotional state helps regulate another’s. Calm presence, tone of voice, or physical closeness can reduce stress and create feelings of safety. Healthy in moderation, risky when it becomes dependency.
Emotional Reliance
A relational pattern where one partner becomes the primary or sole source of emotional stability. Over time, this can strain the relationship and weaken individual self-regulation.
Enmeshment
A boundary-blurring dynamic where emotional identities overlap. One person’s feelings, moods, or approval significantly affect the other’s sense of self. Often mistaken for deep love or devotion.
Protective Cognition
A mental adaptation that forms after emotional injury. The mind shifts from emotional openness to analytical distance as a self-preservation strategy, reframing experiences to avoid future harm.
Romantic Idealism
A belief system that views love as transformative, redemptive, or sufficient on its own. While emotionally rich, it can overlook practical realities like compatibility, emotional maturity, and mutual effort.
Confirmation Bias
A cognitive tendency to favor information that supports existing beliefs. After heartbreak, the mind selectively notices evidence that love is unreliable, reinforcing emotional caution.
Attachment Reinforcement
The use of repetition, language, or rituals to create emotional certainty. Repeated declarations of devotion help soothe anxiety and stabilize perceived connection.
Secure Attachment
A healthy relational style marked by emotional safety, autonomy, trust, and mutual regulation. Love exists without fear of abandonment or loss of self.
Protective Distancing
A coping mechanism where emotional engagement is reduced to prevent further harm. Love is preserved intellectually or philosophically rather than emotionally.
Read This If You Love Too Deeply
If love has ever felt like home and a war zone, this isn’t because you’re broken. It’s because you love without filters.
Intensity is not immaturity.Feeling deeply doesn’t mean you lack control. It means your emotional perception is sharp. The danger isn’t depth. It’s depth without boundaries.
Love can become identity if you let it.When connection starts answering the question “Who am I?”, enmeshment isn’t far behind. Love should add to your life, not replace it.
Potential is not partnership.Seeing who someone could be is projection, not intimacy. Reality is built on patterns, not promises.
Soothing isn’t the same as safety.Someone calming your nervous system feels like security, but real safety doesn’t require emotional outsourcing.
Repetition doesn’t create certainty.Saying “I’m yours” over and over is often the mind trying to stabilize something fragile.
Romantic idealism is beautiful, not sufficient.Love alone cannot compensate for misalignment, avoidance, or emotional immaturity.
Caution after heartbreak is intelligence, not cynicism.When love turns into ideology, the mind is protecting what the heart can’t afford to lose again.
Secure love doesn’t demand disappearance.If loving someone requires shrinking, silencing, or surrendering your inner stability, it isn’t devotion. It’s erosion.
Remember this: Loving deeply is not the problem. Loving without structure is.
You don't need to love less.
You need to love anchored.
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