The content of my Email suggests there are broad principles that deserve repeating:
1. Love and control cannot coexist in the same relationship. Love appreciates a person’s absolute freedom, or it is not love. Controlling another, even for their “own good,” is never loving. People who love with authenticity resist any desire to exercise controlling behavior. Healthy people are vigilant to exorcise controlling tendencies from within themselves when such tendencies rear their very ugly heads.
2. Monitoring another’s behavior: wanting to know what they do all the time, who they talk to, what they eat, who they phoned, who phoned them, what they are thinking, are not indications of love, but of jealousy. Early in a relationship such behavior can be perceived as interest, or as signs that someone cares, but such monitoring is not caring or loving behavior. Love increases freedom. Love doesn’t box people by policing their thoughts or actions.
4. Too much too soon is a sign of doom in a relationship. Feeling very close very quickly, telling everything to someone on a fist date, falling in love “overnight,” having sex because it felt like a person was an instant soul-mate, are signs a relationship has jumped ahead of important developmental milestones.
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