It’s everywhere — on timelines, in cafés with overpriced set menus, in Instagram stories filled with soft lighting and captions that read like poetry but feel more like performance. Love, during this season, is dressed up, filtered, and packaged neatly into something that looks good enough to be admired from the outside. And yet, beneath all that noise, there is a quieter question that rarely gets asked: are we in love, or are we in love with the idea of being in love?
They sound similar enough to be mistaken for one another, especially when emotions are high and the heart is eager. But the difference between the two is not small. It is the difference between something that grows you and something that slowly erodes you. It is also, more often than not, the difference between love and toxicity.
To be in love, in its truest sense, is not poetic in the way movies make it out to be. It is not always pretty, and it is definitely not always convenient. Love, at its core, asks for sacrifice. Not the dramatic, martyr-like kind we like to romanticise, but the quiet, everyday sacrifices that require consistency and humility. It is choosing to show up even when your ego wants to sit down. It is choosing “us” when “me” would be easier. In many ways, sacrifice is not just part of love — it is almost synonymous with it.
This idea isn’t foreign to my culture. In Malay households, love has always been shown more through action than declaration. Growing up, I don't remember my parents saying “I love you” out loud, but they woke up early to cook, stayed up late to worry, worked jobs that drained them to the bones so their children could have more options. Love was a bowl of warm rice with curry or asam pedas, waiting on the table. Love was asking “dah makan?” instead of “I miss you.” Love was sacrifice made so normal that it didn’t even call attention to itself.
Romantic love, when it is real, carries that same energy. It is not about losing yourself entirely, but it is about being willing to give parts of yourself — your time, your comfort, your pride — for the well-being of another. It’s about compromise that doesn’t feel like punishment. It’s about growth that sometimes feels uncomfortable but never unsafe.
Loving the idea of being in love, however, is a different beast altogether.
This kind of love is far more self-centred, though it rarely presents itself that way. It is not about the other person as much as it is about how the relationship makes you feel, how it makes you look, how it completes an image you have of yourself. It is loving the couple photos, the anniversaries, the “taken” status, the sense of being chosen — without fully embracing the responsibility that comes with choosing someone else in return.
In this state, sacrifice becomes selective. You are willing to give, but only when it doesn’t cost too much. You are affectionate, but only when it feels good for you. You stay, not necessarily because the relationship is healthy, but because leaving would disrupt the narrative you’ve built around your life. There is a deep attachment to the label of “being in love,” even when the actual experience feels heavy, confusing, or painful.
This is where toxicity quietly takes root.
A relationship built on loving the idea of love often asks one person to sacrifice more than the other. One person bends, adjusts, forgives, and waits, while the other enjoys the benefits of companionship without fully carrying its weight. Over time, imbalance becomes normal. Red flags get rebranded as patience. Disrespect gets reframed as “this is just how they are.” Pain becomes something to endure rather than something to address.
Culturally, we sometimes unintentionally enable this. We grow up hearing reminders to “sabar,” to “jaga hubungan,” to not be "terlalu ikut perasaan". We are warned not to be following our own impulses or be too impulsive, for the consequences are undesirable. While patience is a virtue, it becomes dangerous when it is used to justify staying in spaces that consistently harm you. There is a difference between sabar and self-abandonment, and love should never require the latter.
Being able to differentiate between loving someone and loving the idea of being in love is crucial precisely because the second can trap you. It traps you in cycles of hope — believing that if you just give a little more, understand a little better, stay a little longer, things will eventually feel like the love you imagined at the beginning. But imagination, no matter how beautiful, cannot sustain a relationship on its own.
One way to recognise the difference is to pay attention to how sacrifice flows. In real love, sacrifice is mutual, even if not always equal in form. Both people feel seen. Both people feel safe to express discomfort without fear of abandonment or dismissal. In contrast, when you are loving the idea of love, sacrifice often feels one-sided. You find yourself justifying why you are always the one adjusting, always the one apologising, always the one understanding.
Another subtle sign lies in how conflict is handled. Love that is grounded in care treats conflict as something to work through together. It may be uncomfortable, but it does not threaten the foundation of the relationship. When someone loves the idea of being in love, conflict feels like an inconvenience or a personal attack. Difficult conversations get avoided, minimised, or flipped back onto you. Peace becomes performative, maintained by silence rather than resolution.
There is also the question of who you are becoming in the relationship. Love, even when challenging, should expand you. It should encourage honesty, self-awareness, and emotional maturity. You should feel more yourself, not less. If being with someone constantly makes you doubt your worth, shrink your needs, or feel guilty for wanting basic respect, it is worth asking whether love is truly present — or whether you are holding onto an image that no longer matches reality.
This doesn’t mean that love is effortless or that relationships should be perfect. No relationship is free from struggle. But struggle in love should feel like effort toward something meaningful, not survival within something harmful. There is a difference between growing pains and emotional erosion, and only one of them is sustainable.
Valentine’s Day, for all its clichés, can be a good moment to pause and reflect. Not just on who we love, but on how we love, and why. Are we choosing someone because we genuinely care about their well-being, or because being with them fulfils a certain fantasy? Are we staying because there is mutual respect and growth, or because leaving would force us to confront loneliness or social judgment?
In Malay culture, we often say “biar lambat, asal selamat.” Perhaps love deserves the same patience — not rushing into it for the sake of having it, not clinging to it just to say we do. Love that is real is worth waiting for, worth working on, and worth protecting. Love that is merely an idea, no matter how intoxicating, is not worth losing yourself over.
Ultimately, love should not feel like a performance you are constantly auditioning for. It should not feel like a role you have to maintain at the expense of your own peace. Love, when it is genuine, feels like a shared journey — imperfect, sometimes messy, but rooted in care, sacrifice, and choice.
This Valentine’s Day, maybe the most loving thing we can do is to be honest with ourselves. To ask whether what we are holding onto is love itself, or just the comfort of believing we have it. And to remember that choosing yourself, especially when something is harming you, is not a failure of love — it is an act of it.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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