Do I love him, or am I afraid of losing him?

Take each line and ask yourself honestly which side you recognise yourself in most often. Not once in a while: most of the time.

The last line is the most important. «I don't want to» is a choice that speaks of love. «I can't» is an impossibility that speaks of survival, and love isn't supposed to be a matter of survival.

Close your eyes for two minutes and seriously imagine this: he goes away for a whole weekend, with friends, somewhere with no signal. No news from Friday evening to Sunday evening. Nothing worrying, nothing hidden, just silence.

Now observe what that sets off in you. Not what you'd like to feel: what you actually feel, right now, just imagining it.

Scenario A: you're not thrilled, you'll miss him, but you can already see what you'd do with your weekend. An evening with your sister, a lie-in, that thing you've been putting off for weeks. On Sunday evening you'd be happy to see him and swap stories.

Scenario B: just thinking about it makes your stomach tighten. Two days without knowing? You already know you'd check your phone every ten minutes, that your weekend would be a waiting room, and that by Sunday you'd resent him, while resenting yourself for resenting him.

You've just measured something precise: the part of your attachment that is security, and the part that is fear. Scenario B, at that level, isn't overflowing love, it's an alarm system that has taken over the controls. The symptoms of emotional dependency break that system down piece by piece, if you want to check more finely.

Now for the nuance that matters most: in real life it's almost never one or the other. You can genuinely love someone AND love them in a dependent way. The love is real, the partner is well chosen, it's the way of loving that is trapped.

How do you tell? Look at what your relationship amplifies. Secure love amplifies the best in you: you dare more, you laugh more easily. Dependent attachment amplifies your fears: you monitor everything, you apologise constantly, and little by little you shrink. Same person, same love perhaps, but two opposite directions.

And that's excellent news, in fact. Because if the problem isn't the person but the attachment style, then there's nothing to break: there's something to repair, in you, for you. And overcoming emotional dependency is a marked path, exercise by exercise, that works perfectly well without leaving anyone.

Three things to do to stop going round in circles.

Go back over the 7 differences and count your lines. Do the weekend test, for real if the chance comes up: imagined answers are useful, lived answers are definitive. And talk about it with someone who knew you before him. Ask them THE awkward question: «how do I seem to you, since I've been with him?»

And if you want a calm, structured measure that doesn't depend on your mood that evening...

One last thing. If you discover that your way of loving leans towards dependency, don't turn that into a verdict on your story. It doesn't mean your love is fake, nor that your relationship is doomed. It means you love with an old fear clinging to your back, and that fear can be set down. Plenty of couples go through this work and come out with a lighter bond than before. Yours can too.