You Always Lose When You Play With Love
On Wuthering Heights and what an almost 200-year-old love story taught me about the ones I’ve lived
So I finally watched Emerald Fennell’s 2026 take on Wuthering Heights last night, and let’s just say there’s a lot to process… It’s very steamy and totally addictive, but also tragic and twisted.
Watching two people who had clearly loved each other since childhood sabotage the simplest, most fulfilled version of their story because of status, revenge, and pride left me an emotional wreck. It was a prime example of how we can try to fight our feelings all we want—suppress them, rationalize them, distract ourselves through others—but that inner knowing doesn’t go anywhere.
The what-ifs linger long, whether it’s a destructive, obsessive dynamic like Heathcliff’s and Catherine’s or not.
Some critics called it emotionally surface-level. I’d disagree. I think the movie asks you to bring your own emotional experiences and self-awareness to it. And if you’ve ever loved someone you weren’t allowed to fully have, or watched someone shrink themselves out of ego and fear instead of just choosing what they wanted—you’ll feel every single second of it.
It reminded me of what the spiritual community calls twin flames and karmic relationships. Two souls that feel deeply aligned, yet treat love—and each other—like a complex game where someone has to win. But you always tend to lose anyway when you approach love with blocked vulnerability and underlying motives.
When you knowingly toy with someone’s heart.
I’ve found myself in this dynamic at least twice in life so far. I’ve loved people effortlessly, vulnerably, and deeply, only to be met with manipulation, gaslighting, and emotional abuse. On top of physical and sexual trauma I’d already endured before and in between.
And the hardest part isn’t even the pain and confusion that lingered for years afterward. It’s that underneath all of it, the love I felt for and from them was still real, and I knew it. Even now, knowing and trusting in my intuitive and empathic abilities the way I do, I’d say the same thing. It wasn’t a delusion; it was always something I could sense in people, no matter how hard they tried to suppress or avoid it.
The complexity and nuance of those dynamics left me deeply disconnected from myself, as I tried to stay connected to a love they only ever offered in crumbs and intermittent spurts. A lot of my pain and suffering came from my own attachment to the potential I could feel beneath the surface, despite it being intentionally kept from me. Feelings and depth I was never fully allowed to access or consistently experience.
These tensions don’t just stay between the two people either.
What Heathcliff and Catherine refused to simply choose left a trail of wreckage for everyone who got close to them in the meantime. Mr. Linton loved a woman whose heart was never fully his to have, and under Heathcliff’s influence, Isabella completely unraveled—bringing out something almost feral in her that, under different circumstances, might have actually been his match.
The suppression of what’s real doesn’t just hurt the two people involved. It pulls everyone else into the chaos of it. And the wild part? All of this was happening under the weight of strict societal expectations that most of us no longer live under. Yet here we are, still engaging in and perpetuating the exact same dynamics.
A few hours before I even considered watching the movie, my dad and I had already talked about a similar pattern. We’d discussed how much of our wounding in love and in our connections with others comes from the assumption that people will approach us with the same genuineness we offer them. Not that we’re the ones who always get it right, but that when we do fall short, it’s our humanness showing, not an actual intention to hurt or mislead. That distinction doesn’t seem to be shared by everyone.
Truly meaning what we say.
Showing up as ourselves.
Not operating from motive.
When we move through the world that way, people call us naive and easy to gaslight. They doubt our sincerity or mistake our kindness for people-pleasing and performance, when really we’re just extending the treatment that we believe all human beings deserve.
My dad always said it was a strong issue with injustice that he always recognized inside of me—again, that Libra moon of mine makes an appearance! But yeah, for a long time, I didn’t understand why my love, friendship, kindness, and support were so difficult to receive without suspicion. Like for real, who hurt y’all???
But I understand it now. It’s just fear—the same thing I feel every time I leave these dynamics. Fear of it all just repeating with the next person.
But that doesn’t mean I have to let that fear continue to guide me. So I don’t.
Because fear won’t comfort you when you’re lonely at night—whether you’re sleeping alone or lying next to the wrong person—and you finally realize that it isn’t anyone else’s job to pull you through your own barriers simply because they can sense the potential beneath them. It’s not anyone’s job to continuously accept mistreatment and misunderstanding just to receive their loyalty and love in return. What I’m understanding more and more, through my own life and through watching a story like this unfold on screen, is that all we can really do is hold ourselves to the standard of what genuine love and presence actually looks like. And trust that the people who are ready to get out of their own way will eventually see their own reflection in that.
Because even when we do nothing but love someone honestly, we still lose them…eventually. So why make it complicated from the start when it could be so much easier? Why do we tiptoe around our own hearts when we honestly don’t have that much time to enjoy love and life while we’re here?
We tell ourselves we’ll have more time.
That we need to try the greener grass on the other side.
That they’ll eventually come back.
And that things will always work themselves out.
All the while, we’re actively constructing a version of ourselves, our desires, and our lives that isn’t true—waiting for the outcome we really want to arrive, as if our restraint is its own reward. But what if going after what you honestly want is what’s actually best for you? What if we allowed ourselves to believe that God gave us these yearnings for a reason? Or do we keep suppressing our deepest desires and settling for “enough,” when enough never really is?
Just a thought…
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Beautiful 💛💛