Also, I just wanted to say that this story is not at all about love. This isn't how love works. If someone was in this kind of relationship in the real world, they would very obviously be an abuse survivor. This is codependency, isolationism, and a slew of other bullshit that makes a person like this. It doesn't have anything to do with "love". Even by some fucked up standard- if you consider love to just be having an attachment to someone rather than more complex definitions of what makes "true" love- if he had loved him he wouldn't have "cheated" on him. If he had loved him, he would have understood that he was important to him, and not put himself in danger. Love is not "dependent upon for survival", it's an emotional and intellectual connection, even at it's most basic form. This isn't "love", it's classic attention-seeking behavior. In the real world, if we wanted to put a label on it, and I don't, I'm not sure it would be neurotypical at all- but I could see someone developing a generalized anxiety disorder with attachment issues, attention-seeking behavior, and reckless endangerment behavioral outbursts associated with negative or disingenuous thought schemas and a lack of impulse control- exacerbated by intense learned helplessness, if they were raised in the environment I've set up here. Again, though, those would be normal human reactions and not at all indicative of any kind of innate neurochemical or genetic disorder- just a "healthy", normal response to the environment, as a survival mechanism. Those things would be there to preserve sanity, not crush it.

But yeah, it's not love. No one is in love. I never intended for it to read like that, so, I just wanted to clear that up. I guess it goes back to what we were talking about before, and how authorial intent is important to me, so I just wanted to let everyone know what my intent was. If you're one of those people who it doesn't matter to, you can just ignore this post, I guess.