When Love Turns Violent: Roses, Parks, and Restraint

Happy keeps a small potted rose on our balcony that she waters with the devotion of someone tending a shrine. Last month, she loved it so much she repotted it three times in two weeks, trying to give it better soil, more space, optimal conditions. The rose died from the shock of so much care.

We are a species that loves things to death.

Every weekend, thousands of people drive to national parks to experience pristine nature, their exhaust fumes contributing to the atmospheric changes that are destroying the very ecosystems they’ve come to appreciate. We say we love wildlife while living in ways that ensure there will be less of it every year. We claim to love the planet while participating in systems designed to consume it as efficiently as possible.

This isn’t hypocrisy—it’s something more complex and tragic. We genuinely love what we destroy, but we love it in a way that makes our love indistinguishable from violence.

I think about the way I love Arash—the fierce protectiveness that sometimes becomes controlling, the desire to give him every opportunity that sometimes becomes overwhelming pressure, the wish to shield him from suffering that sometimes prevents him from developing resilience. Love that doesn’t know its own boundaries becomes a form of harm.

Our love for nature follows the same pattern. We love forests, so we turn them into parks with paved paths and visitor centers, eliminating the wildness that made them worth loving. We love mountains, so we build roads and hotels and cable cars to make them accessible, destroying their majesty in the process of making it available.

We love like colonizers—we see beauty and immediately want to possess it, improve it, make it serve our needs. We can’t let things be what they are; we have to make them what we think they should be.

The rose on our balcony died because Happy loved it with human love rather than plant love. She gave it what she would have wanted—attention, care, constant improvement—rather than what it actually needed, which was to be left alone to grow at its own pace.

We destroy what we love because we love like humans—possessively, anxiously, with the need to control outcomes. We haven’t learned how to love like nature loves—patiently, without agenda, allowing things to be themselves even when that means they might die or change or become something other than what we wanted them to be.

Perhaps the deepest reason we destroy what we claim to love is that we’ve forgotten the difference between love and consumption. We think loving something means making it ours, using it for our pleasure, extracting value from it. We love the earth the way a child loves a toy—by playing with it until it breaks.

Real love would mean learning to receive the world’s gifts without depleting them, to appreciate beauty without possessing it, to find joy in the flourishing of things we can never own or control.

But that would require us to love like the earth loves us—unconditionally, without expectation, providing what we need whether we deserve it or not.

We are still learning how to love without destroying. The rose on our balcony was one lesson. The planet is another.