«Before everything collapsed, I remember a peculiar feeling: a strange, burning cocktail of anxiety and illusions. It didn’t feel like love in the way I imagined it should. It was more like a dependency that grew quietly, day by day». We often talk about illusions in relationships, but rarely do we pause to ask: how do these illusions breed anxiety?

Think about the days when you felt truly calm in your relationship. They were likely the days when everything felt predictable—when the illusion was working. But the illusion is never permanent. As soon as reality intrudes—an unexpected change, a moment of distance—the anxiety creeps in. And suddenly, you’re not sure if what you believed was ever real.

The Need for Control: More Than Jealousy

Anxiety in relationships is often described as fear of loss. But underneath, it’s much more than that. It’s the creeping realization that you never had control to begin with. The moment your partner begins to evolve—new job, new social circle, new interests—you feel it. That flutter in your chest isn’t just jealousy. It’s a subconscious alarm that the illusion of mutual dependency is cracking.

Many people don’t fear their partner’s independence; they fear what that independence reveals about their own emptiness. Because when someone matters deeply to you—not in a healthy, respectful way, but in an absorbing, consuming way—their steps away from you feel like betrayal. This is not love. This is fusion.

Love Is Not Fusion

True love is not fusion. It is not about becoming one organism. It is not about making the other person an extension of yourself. If that were the case, you would celebrate your partner’s joy the same way you celebrate your own. But what happens instead? You panic. You feel abandoned. You feel powerless.

This is because many people confuse love with merging. But mature love accepts that the other person is a whole being—separate, sovereign, free. They are not your limb. They are not your second half. They are not your prosthesis.

The Prosthetic Illusion

Let’s talk about that metaphor for a moment. A prosthetic limb helps you function. It fills a need, compensates for a loss. But what if you start using it so much that you stop using your real muscles? They begin to atrophy. You rely more and more on the external support, until one day it malfunctions. And suddenly, you realize how weak you've become. You realize you cannot walk without it anymore.

This is what happens in codependent relationships. You grow so used to the presence of the other that you forget how to stand on your own. You forget that you once had your own rhythm, your own thoughts, your own sense of stability. And when that support wavers, your anxiety explodes—not because you’ve lost love, but because you’ve lost your emotional scaffolding.

Illusions Feed Dependency

Illusions are not just wishful thinking. They are defense mechanisms. They allow the childlike part of you—the one that longs to be held, saved, completed—to believe that another person can do for you what you haven't yet learned to do for yourself.

That part of you is terrified of control. It wants to hand it over. It says, "Here, you take it. You love me, right? So guide me, lead me, complete me." And for a while, the illusion works. But over time, this small voice grows. It drowns out your wiser self—the part that knows love must exist alongside freedom.

Illusions become comforting lies. They let you believe your partner is yours unconditionally, that their life revolves around you. But the reality is different. Your partner is also making a calculation. Are you effective in their life? Do you bring them peace, joy, meaning? Or have you become a weight?

Why the Anxiety Feels Like Panic

When the illusion cracks, anxiety floods in. Because now you’re looking at someone who is not an object of comfort, but a person with a life of their own. And that’s terrifying—because you built your emotional house on the idea that they were yours. Entirely. Forever.

You didn’t realize that while you saw them as a prosthesis, they may have seen you the same way. You both were leaning on each other. But one of you decided to walk away. And the other, with atrophied muscles, couldn’t move.

This is why regaining control matters. Not control over the other person—but control over your own emotions, your own sense of self. Anxiety becomes your compass. It tells you: you’ve lost connection with yourself. You’re relying too heavily on someone else for emotional survival.

Growing Out of the Illusion

That inner tug-of-war—the struggle between the childlike self that wants to fuse and the mature self that wants to connect—is what causes internal conflict. And it’s this conflict that breeds most of the anxiety. If you let illusions win, the child grows into something darker. More demanding. More fearful. It starts seeking constant validation, asking: “Do you still love me? Will you stay? Are you mine?”

From that place, it’s easy to manipulate, provoke, test. People say they want honesty in relationships, but what they really want is reassurance. And when they don’t get it, they try to control the outcome by threatening to leave—only to be shocked when the other person lets them go.

Control isn’t gained through power over another. It is gained by facing your own fears, accepting the separateness of the one you love, and choosing to love anyway.

The Role of the Mind

To understand all of this requires more than emotions. It requires thought. Reflection. Introspection. The desire to wake up from illusion, no matter how comforting it was. Because eventually, illusions suffocate. They paralyze. They destroy the natural balance in a relationship.

Anxiety is not your enemy—it is your signal. The earlier you recognize it, the earlier you can stop the spread of illusions and start reclaiming your strength. And perhaps then, you’ll no longer look at love as an escape, but as a choice. Not a prosthesis, but a partnership.