When Love Ceases to Be a Demon: Rediscovering the Balance in Love

In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis said, “Love ceases to be a demon when it ceases to be a god.” In other words, love becomes safe when we stop worshiping it.

For more on The Four Loves, click HERE.

But that’s hard to do in a culture that keeps telling us, or at least promoting the idea, that love should be all-consuming. That if you don’t “lose yourself” in someone, it’s not real. That your partner should be your everything: your home, your healer, your fate. We’re soaked in this myth—from Nicholas Sparks and teenage love triangles to The Bachelor and our Instagram feeds. Everywhere we turn, love is sold as a soulmate high, not a relational practice. It’s all chemistry, chaos, and cosmic destiny, fireworks and trauma bonding, rarely compatibility, repair, or the deeply unsexy art of trying again.

And most of us don’t question it until our relationships start to crack under the weight of this synthetic, hyper-emotional fantasy of perfection.

Because, as much as it sounds romantic, love as a god isn’t sustainable. It leads to anxiety, obsession, idealization, and eventually, emotional burnout. It makes people feel insecure, resentful, and/or avoidant. Not because they don’t care, but because they were never meant to carry the weight of being someone’s all-in-all, their “salvation.”

Can you imagine what might happen if we stopped idolizing love and instead grounded it in reality?

Love is not an Idol

The Lies We Live

There’s a kind of modern mythology around love: this idea that when you find “the one,” everything will fall into place. That their presence will fix your wounds, regulate your nervous system, and give your life meaning.

But that myth is costing us.

Psychological research, especially in attachment theory, reveals what happens when we try to make love our primary source of identity and security. People with anxious attachment often become hyper-focused on their partner’s moods, texts, and cues, trying to earn closeness at all costs. On the other hand, avoidantly attached individuals often feel smothered by that intensity, pulling away to protect their independence and sanity.

And neither one feels at peace.

Why? Because peace doesn’t come from enmeshment or detachment—it comes from connection with differentiation. Despite how good it might feel, love doesn’t require us to disappear into each other. It requires us to stay ourselves, even as we reach for each other.

When we expect love to complete us, we inevitably collapse under the disappointment when it doesn’t. And then we start blaming our partners, or ourselves, for a problem that was never theirs to solve.

This is how love becomes a demon: not because it’s wrong, but because we load it with impossible expectations, asking it to be our salvation instead of our connection.

Here’s the revised section with the new research woven in for clarity, emotional impact, and source credibility:

Reclaiming Love Through Reorientation

What Lewis offers—and what psychology confirms—is a reorientation.

Instead of treating love like a god, we can treat it like a garden.

In a garden, things grow slowly. There are seasons of flourishing and seasons of pruning. Growth takes effort, attention, and patience. You don’t scream at a seed for not becoming a tree overnight. You tend to it. You protect it. You let it take the time it needs—and over time, it becomes the kind of love that lasts.

And the data backs this up. Research shows that relationship satisfaction is far more influenced by daily emotional attunement, affection, and availability than by dramatic gestures or chemistry highs. One 2025 study even found that couples with higher emotional attunement show greater brain synchrony in regions tied to emotional regulation and connection (PMC, 2025). Emotional intelligence itself—our ability to listen, respond, and co-regulate—is strongly linked to long-term satisfaction, according to a meta-analysis published in Personality and Individual Differences (Jardine et al., 2022).

Translation? It’s not about sweeping someone off their feet. It’s about showing up consistently. Not perfectly, but faithfully.

It’s about building trust in how you both respond when life gets hard. When you’re tired, grieving, anxious, or unsure. When you forget who you are. When the spark fades, and you choose to love anyway.

Can love stay when it no longer feels godlike? That’s the real question. And the answer reveals whether it was worship—or real love—all along.

Practicing Balanced Love

Balanced love is not boring love. It’s deep, rich, and rooted. But it requires a few shifts in posture:

Let go of the fantasy.

You’re not broken if your relationship doesn’t feel like a romcom. You’re human. Idealization will only keep you chasing something that doesn’t exist.

Pursue wholeness, not completion.

Your partner can support your healing, but they cannot do it for you. Do your own work. Cultivate friendships, passions, and purpose outside your relationship.

Invest in rhythms, not intensity.

Build your love in daily habits, not just in big moments. Check in. Say thank you. Repair quickly. Laugh at yourself often. These are the things that build trust over time.

Stay differentiated.

Be close, but stay distinct. Healthy love requires space for each person’s thoughts, feelings, and boundaries. Fusion is not intimacy. It’s anxiety disguised as closeness. Click HERE for more on this.

Let love grow slow.

You don’t need to feel "in love" every day. But you can always choose to love in the small ways: by listening, softening, trying again. That’s where depth is forged.

Love That Lasts Isn’t a High It’s a Habit

The kind of love that heals isn’t flashy. It doesn’t always come with butterflies or fireworks. It often comes with silence, repair, humor, and hard conversations.

It means letting someone be human instead of expecting them to be a god, so you can actually love them. Not worship them. Not fix them. Not control them. Just love them.

And that kind of love? It’s not a demon. It’s not a god. It’s just good.

So, start asking yourself, where have I made love a god? And what would it look like to let it be a garden instead?