I've sat across from so many people who say they’re in love, but their hands are clenched. I see the stomach that is a knot of acid whenever their partner is out of sight. You call it love, this feeling that gnaws at your insides, this constant, low-grade hum of anxiety that you mistake for passion. You check their phone. You question their friendships. You require constant reassurance, a steady drip of validation to soothe the beast of your insecurity. When they are happy in your absence, a part of you withers. When they grow and change in ways that don’t include you, you feel a spike of terror, a primal fear of abandonment that you quickly disguise as concern. Let’s call this what it is. Not love. Not devotion. It’s a cage. A gilded one, perhaps, decorated with the language of romance and commitment, but a cage nonetheless. And you are both the prisoner and the jailer. This is the love of the third dimension, the 3D love that most of us are programmed with from birth. It’s a love born of lack, of scarcity, of the deep, mistaken belief that another person can complete you, can fill the