Why Do We Keep Loving People Who Betray Us?
Why Do We Keep Loving People Who Betray Us?
On betrayal out of love, and what we're actually doing when we pick up those books
Why do we keep picking up books about people who betray us?
One of my readers posted her current reading list, and every book on it had the same shape. I asked her: hey, are you okay? Then I looked at my own list and thought, Frankie. Is there something we need to talk about here.
So let's talk about it.
What reading actually does
I think we pick up books on certain topics because we're trying to find a way through something. We don't want to stay stuck in the cycle we're in. We want to grow out of it, and reading gives us that — other people's points of view, with the experience of having gone through it.
Here's my proof, and it's a little humiliating.
I had never been in a boat. But I'd read My Side of the Mountain, which taught me that you can genuinely learn things from books — he explains every trap he sets and everything he has to do to survive up there. And I'd read Anne of Green Gables, which has a scene where she rows a boat.
So I knew how to do this.
I was maybe ten. My grandpa was a one-man band — the pony kid — and he was playing a fish fry out at a lake. One of the families had a canoe. I asked if I could borrow it. They asked if I knew how to use it. I said yes I do, with enormous confidence.
My sister and I got in. I followed Anne's instructions exactly. I rowed us out into the lake.
Nowhere in Anne of Green Gables does it explain how to turn.
I had to call my dad. He swam out, hung onto the side of the canoe, and asked what the problem was. I told him I didn't know how to turn. He gave me a look, started laughing, and said: you only use one oar.
Oh my god.
I got us turned around. But that's the thing about reading, and it's why a book does something a TV show can't. Watching has distance built into it — you're seeing and hearing, and that's all. You don't get the smell of it, the sun on your skin, what it actually feels like to be inside the story. Reading puts you in there.
Which brings me to betrayal.
(Quick note: Tesla was extremely demandy while I recorded this. Very lovey, not normal, said no to my no repeatedly, and those claws are getting trimmed tonight. I have a baby. That's just what we're working with.)
Betrayal that's supposed to be for your own good
Sometimes the betrayal is meant to protect you.
In Where the Dust Still Glows, Brax betrays Dreyma by trapping her in Dreamland. He does it because he can see how obsessed she's become with building a Dreamland subsystem that maintains itself — a genuinely complicated problem she's struggling with, one she needs help on, and she is not a person who asks for help. Her whole life has collapsed into this one thing.
So he knocks her out. Traps her. And then goes to work actively destroying Dreamland, because that's the only route he can see to saving his sister.
That's one kind of betrayal, and honestly it's one of the nicer ones.
Mine
My most impactful betrayal out of love happened when my mother took custody of my daughters.
She did it out of love for my daughters. But to do it, she had to twist the love my daughters had for me until they feared me, and she used my love for my daughters as a weapon to control me. She did all of it to protect them from me.
So what was she protecting them from?
I was a single mom. I had to work, and I made decisions based on survivability. The rent got paid. Food was on the table. Maybe their clothes weren't the best, but they had clothes and they had somewhere to sleep. What I did not do was spend a lot of time playing with them. I never prioritized time with them, because my time had to go into surviving.
She read that as: I didn't love my daughters.
She came up in a era when a woman could stay home and raise the kids and be that person, and she did that, because she could. My dad made enough to cover her and her children.
And the problem I created — the one she had to overcome — was that I was supposed to be the mother, and she was the real mother, and I was attempting to replace her. So I became someone she had to compete with.
I don't fully comprehend it, even now. She protected my daughters from an enemy she perceived in me, and used love in a dozen different ways to get the result the rest of us then had to live through.
There were smaller ones all through that, too. People who shielded me from certain conversations — which just meant I got blindsided, because I didn't know what was coming and had no time to work out how to react. And I did not handle surprise information well back then. I was an emotions-first, questions-later person, which made me very easy to manipulate.
Betrayal wears a lot of masks
It doesn't have to be big. It can be white lies. Withholding information. A flat refusal to see someone else's point of view.
That last one especially right now, with a political divide wide enough to reach into everything — how we relate to the people in our lives, which conversations we're able to have with them, and which relationships we're even willing to keep.
Betrayal by the people who love us comes from a lot of directions and wears a lot of faces.
What I think we're really doing with those books
I think when we pick up these stories, we're checking our own work.
Did I do the right thing? Did I react the right way? Did I move in the right direction, say the right thing? Was I right to cut them out over it — or did I overreact? Did I underreact?
Am I still in a situation I shouldn't be in anymore? Am I still letting myself be used?
And if the answer to that last one is yes, then can I use this story, this character, to find a rope? A lifeline to climb out of a hole I made for myself by trusting the wrong people, loving the wrong people, letting myself get that close and that entangled?
That's why this trope keeps showing up. It's not morbid. It's diagnostic.
So as you're reading, don't be afraid to ask yourself the questions. And don't be afraid to reach through the pages, because the heroes in the books we read are sometimes the heroes we need and don't have in our own lives.
Questions Readers Ask Me About This
What does "betrayal out of love" mean as a trope?
Someone who genuinely loves you does something harmful because they love you — protecting you from a danger they've decided you are, or that you can't be trusted to handle. It's sharper than a villain betrayal, because you can't file the person under enemy and move on.
Who are Brax and Dreyma?
Siblings in Where the Dust Still Glows. Dreyma climbed out of nothing into godhood and is destroying herself trying to solve a problem she won't ask for help with. Brax is the brother who decides the way to save her is to take the choice away from her. It's the most morally complicated relationship in the book, and nobody comes out of it clean.
Does Where the Dust Still Glows have a happy ending?
It has an earned one. Consequences stick in my books — nobody gets rescued, the damage doesn't un-happen, and the people who did harm don't get tidy redemption arcs. What you get instead is people building something real out of what's left. If you need everything restored by the last page, I'm probably not your author.
Why write about this instead of just processing it privately?
Because fiction let me try versions I didn't get in real life. I've written characters who healed in ways I haven't managed, and watching them do it on the page taught me things. That's the same thing I'm hoping a reader gets from my books.
Where should I start with your books?
Where the Dust Still Glows is book one of the Dream Lord Wars and a clean entry point. If you'd rather start with witches and demons, that's the Whiskey Witches series.
Where the Dust Still Glows is out now on Amazon and free in Kindle Unlimited.
For readers of Blood Over Bright Haven and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
If this one hit close, come talk about it with us in the Trauma Llama Slayers on Facebook. That's what the group is for.
Happy reading. 🦙
