The Curse of ‘Care’: When Love Feels Like Control

...with a systems twist on anti-trust, autonomy, and emotional infrastructure

We’ve all heard it—sometimes joked about at family dinners, sometimes whispered in therapy: the Jewish mother curse.

Not a spell, but a pattern.

A love so thick with obligation it starts to feel like surveillance.

“I made you soup because I love you,”

becomes: “and now you owe me your soul.”

This isn’t just about mothers. Or Judaism.

It’s about what happens when care is used as currency—

when love demands repayment in submission.

In a recent relationship, this curse took center stage.

When I drew a boundary, I was told I was:

Abusive

Controlling

Colluding with a thief

And—most absurdly—speaking like Putin “saving Ukraine from itself”

Let that sink in.

A simple “no” was labeled a geopolitical war crime.

This is what happens when emotional infrastructure collapses.

When one person’s pain is used to justify breaching another’s autonomy.

It’s not care—it’s coercion wearing a tender face.

And here’s where the metaphor expands:

Anti-Trust Behavior and Over-Connectivity

In tech, we regulate monopolies because unchecked power corrupts systems.

In relationships, we sense that corruption.

We resist being dominated—because we’ve been there before.

So we start to:

Resist help

Question motives

Shrink from intimacy

Default to suspicion

It’s not because we don’t want connection.

It’s because we’ve experienced over-connection without consent.

Emotional Infrastructure = System Design

Here’s what we forget:

Healthy love is not seamless.

Like ethical tech, it needs boundaries, governance, latency, and choice.

Consider:

Emotional Firewalls: The right to say “no” without punishment

Autonomy Protocols: Respect for how another lives, heals, grows

Latency: The natural need for space after overload

Codependency Loops: When helping becomes identity, and autonomy becomes threat

Care without permission becomes control.

Love without limits becomes extraction.

Just as too many API connections make a system vulnerable,

too much “unasked-for care” can corrode trust at the root.

So when someone says:

“You don’t trust me because you won’t let me help,”

the real answer might be:

“I do trust you—to respect my boundaries. To let me define what help means.”

Because here’s the truth:

The real curse isn’t the guilt-trip or the accusations.

It’s believing that love means ownership.

The Upgrade: Sovereign Love

We don’t need seamless love.

We need resilient love.

One that’s decentralized, permissioned, peer-to-peer.

A love that says:

I care for you. But I don’t control you.

I want closeness. But not at the cost of my shape.

I’ll offer help—but I won’t make it your debt.

Because love without freedom?

That’s not love.

That’s captivity, in a velvet-gloved design flaw.