It often begins beautifully. A shared laugh. Long conversations that spill into dawn. You feel seen, chosen, even lit up from the inside out. Suddenly, someone else’s presence becomes the emotional weather of your day. You reach for your phone before your toothbrush. Their silence? Loud. Their attention? Addictive. You tell yourself this is love.
For many Nigerians, especially women, the distinction between love and emotional dependence isn’t just blurry—it’s rarely even explored. Our culture praises loyalty but often confuses it with emotional self-erasure. We’ve watched generations of women “stand by their man,” even when doing so meant standing in the rubble of their own joy. We’ve seen men equate control with care and affection with ownership. From Nollywood storylines to kitchen-table advice, there’s a recurring theme: endurance is romantic, and needing someone is proof that you love them. But is it?
Love and emotional dependence are not synonymous. One expands you. The other consumes you.
Kemi, 30, recalls the slow unravelling of a situationship that, though brief, drained her more than any official relationship ever had. “It wasn’t deep-deep,” she says. “But I found myself constantly checking my phone, reshuffling my plans just in case he suddenly decided I was worth his time. I knew I didn’t love him—not really. But the fear of him not choosing me made me feel physically ill. That’s when I knew something wasn’t right.”
Emotional dependence is sly. It doesn’t show up dressed in red flags—it wears romance like perfume. You think constantly checking in means connection. You think missing them so badly it hurts means depth. You think the anxiety you feel when they’re not around is passion. But often, it’s not passion. It’s panic. A subtle, constant dread that if they leave, you’ll collapse into a version of yourself you no longer recognise.
It’s not always about the other person either.
Emotional dependence is often about what we need from them—validation, stability, identity. We cling not just to who they are, but to what their presence does for our sense of self. When your self-worth is unstable, someone else’s attention can feel like a life raft. You mistake the relief of being seen for the substance of love.
Tunde, 34, knows that feeling all too well. “I used to think love meant thinking about her all the time,” he says. “Like I couldn’t enjoy anything unless we were doing it together. But then she travelled for two weeks, and I felt like I was falling apart. That’s when I realised—I hadn’t just missed her. I had built my entire sense of peace around her.”
That’s what emotional dependence does. It makes you forget how to be alone. It makes solitude feel like punishment. It makes you outsource your peace of mind to another person’s availability, their mood, and their whims.
And it’s not just romantic relationships. Friendships can become emotional crutches, too. You know the type—people who panic at the thought of a friend setting a boundary. People who overstay in one-sided dynamics because the idea of starting over feels more unbearable than the pain of staying. At its core, emotional dependence is rooted in fear: fear of abandonment, of insignificance, of sitting with your own silence.
But love—real love—requires a whole self. Not a half looking for its missing piece.
Of course, love is vulnerable. To love is to risk being hurt, to give someone the power to wound you and trust that they won’t. But there’s a difference between vulnerability and surrender. There’s a difference between holding space for someone and losing yourself inside them. Love says, ‘I choose you, but I remain myself.’ Emotional dependence says, I can’t be okay unless you choose me back.
This is perhaps where our collective confusion lies. We’ve learned to glamorise intensity. The pining. The tears. The fights followed by desperate reconciliations. The constant monitoring of WhatsApp last-seens and decoding of Instagram captions. We call it passion, but it’s often just anxiety with a romantic filter. Attachment wounds dressed up in candlelight.
So, how can you tell the difference?
The answer isn’t in how often you talk or how strongly you feel. It’s in what remains when they’re gone. If their absence rattles the foundations of your self-worth, it’s not love—it’s dependency. If you still feel grounded, purposeful, and at peace when they’re not around, then perhaps you’ve built something healthier. Real love makes room for you to be whole. Dependency needs you to stay fragmented.
The truth is, most of us learn this difference the hard way. We call it love until it hurts too much. Until we find ourselves saying things like, “I don’t know who I am without them.” Until the panic of disconnection becomes a daily ritual. And eventually, if we’re lucky, we learn that no relationship should cost us ourselves.
There’s no shame in realising you were emotionally dependent. Many of us were raised on love stories where obsession was the plot twist. We were taught that jealousy is devotion, that suffering is romantic, that sacrifice is the ultimate expression of love. But healing begins with the uncomfortable questions. Why does this person’s affection feel like oxygen? Why do I feel worthless without them? Why does their distance feel like a punishment I must fix?
Those questions aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of awakening.
Because at the core of emotional health is this truth: love should feel like a safe place to land, not an escape hatch from your own loneliness. And any relationship that requires you to shrink yourself to fit inside it is already too small.
Sometimes, walking away isn’t about giving up. It’s about reclaiming the parts of yourself that forgot how to stand alone. It’s about choosing peace over panic. Clarity over chaos. It’s about learning that the kind of love worth having is the kind that doesn’t ask you to trade your wholeness for companionship.
The question rarely comes when things are rosy. It sneaks in through the cracks—when they don’t text back for hours, when they talk about solo plans and you feel a tightening in your chest, when the silence between messages begins to feel like abandonment rather than just space.
And then, in that still moment, you ask what no one ever taught you to ask: Do I really love this person… or am I just afraid of what I’ll find if I’m alone with myself?
That’s not just a question. That’s a mirror. And the answer could be the beginning of everything.
