Dear Tineoidea,

His mother basically dumped him when he was little and his father eloped shortly after he was born if I remember correctly, so he was raised by his grandparents.

So he was almost an orphan.

Not sure if this affected anything though.

It almost certainly contributed to his possessiveness. And it could be that you sympathized with him, because you too were abandoned by your father when you were very young. You two are similar in that sense, only you had the luck that you had a loving and caring mother, and he didn’t.

It seems to me that you took pity on him, but also saw yourself in him. As you were caring for him, you probably were also caring for your own inner child – the little boy who was abandoned by his father. You didn’t want to be like your father, so you could never abandon him. That’s why loyalty was so important to you.

So it’s not that you didn’t have a healthy model of love, as I assumed earlier (you did, thanks to your mother), but rather, you loved him as your own child, because you recognized yourself in him.

Does that make sense?