ABUSE IS NOT LOVE: Is Surveillance The New Love Language?

We have become so accustomed to digital surveillance that sometimes we mistake control for care, jealousy for desire, and access for intimacy. But what happens when the person monitoring you is the person who says they love you?

There is an important question we rarely ask at the beginning of a relationship: How much access should another person have to you?

Your location. Your phone. Your passwords. Your messages. Your online activity. Who you follow. Who follows you. Where you are. Who you're with. Why you haven't replied. Why you liked that photograph. Why you were online but didn't answer…

None of these things necessarily sound frightening on their own. Some can even sound romantic. We’ve all heard these; “I just want to know you're safe. I miss you. Why didn't you tell me where you were? I trust you. I just want your password. I get jealous because I care.” Right?

And that might be the most unsettling part of modern intimacy: some forms of control no longer arrive looking like control.

They arrive looking like concern, they arrive looking like devotion, they arrive disguised as love.

This is the question at the centre of the global thought leadership commissioned through YSL Beauty's Abuse Is Not Love initiative, which has spent the past several years working to prevent and identify intimate partner violence. The programme was created in 2020 and combines education, support for non-profit organisations, training and research designed to help people recognise abusive behaviours before they escalate. Its latest work turns its attention to a particularly modern problem: technology-facilitated intimate partner violence, or TFIPV.

The report draws on qualitative analysis with NGO experts across ten countries, examining why young people aged 16 to 24 remain particularly vulnerable to technology-facilitated intimate partner violence.

To explore why young people can struggle to recognise it, YSL Beauty worked with leading psychologist and movement psychotherapist Dr. Nina Jane Patel, whose work sits at the intersection of embodied psychology, child development and emerging technology. Patel's clinical and research work focuses on how digital environments affect children, families and human behaviour, and her 2026 book Childhood in a Quantum Age examines how we can raise and support young people in an increasingly technological world.

Her involvement makes sense because this isn't simply a conversation about phones. It is a conversation about what our phones are teaching us about love. And Patel's answer to why young people struggle to recognise digital abuse is strikingly simple:

“It is a systemic issue, not an individual deficit.”

She argues that young people have grown up in an environment where sharing locations, passwords and daily activity has become so ordinary that surveillance itself can feel like the default setting of intimacy. Which raises another unsettling question.

"What if we have been teaching an entire generation that being loved means having nothing to hide?"

When surveillance becomes normal

The problem begins long before someone enters their first serious relationship. A teenager might have their location shared with their parents. Their screen time monitored. Their messages checked. Their passwords known. Their accounts supervised.

And often, this is not sinister. It is love. It is a parent worrying that their child hasn't come home. It is a mother checking that her daughter arrived safely. It is a father wanting to know where his son is. It is a family trying to navigate a world where the dangers facing young people have moved partly online.

Patel is careful not to frame parental monitoring as inherently wrong. In fact, she stresses that the intention is often entirely protective. But she identifies an unintended lesson that can be much harder to see.

“If you love me and want me to feel safe, you must have no digital privacy.”

She says this was something she heard repeatedly through her interviews with YSL Beauty's Abuse Is Not Love NGO partners. Children can learn to accept being controlled because they have learned to associate that control with love.

And then they grow up. They enter a relationship. Their partner asks for their password. They share it. Their partner asks them to turn on location sharing. They do. A notification arrives asking where they are. They answer. Their partner wants to know who they were with. They explain.

None of it necessarily feels like a boundary being crossed because the boundary was never clearly taught in the first place. As Patel puts it:

“The problem isn't entirely the technology, or the parents' intentions. It's that no one has taught digital consent as part of a healthy relationship at home, at school, or anywhere else.”

That really matters, because this isn't an argument for parents to stop caring. It is an argument for teaching young people that care and access are not the same thing.

We have built a culture where surveillance and love speak the same language

Perhaps this is why the most disturbing part of digital abuse is also the least cinematic. There is no slammed door. No broken glass. No bruised arm. Sometimes there isn't even an obviously threatening message. There is simply a person who wants to know where you are.

Then wants to know why you haven't replied. Then wants to know who you're with. Then wants to know why you liked someone's photograph. Then wants your password. Then wants you to stop following someone. Then wants you to delete the photograph. Then wants you to leave the group chat.

And by the time you realise how much of your life has become subject to another person's approval, you may have already forgotten what privacy felt like.

Patel describes the cultural problem:

“Because we've built a culture where surveillance and love use the same vocabulary. A young person doesn't hear tracking; they hear being wanted and loved.”

And perhaps this is why simply telling someone to “spot the red flags” is not enough. You have to teach them what the red flag actually means. Because jealousy has been romanticised. Possessiveness has been romanticised. The obsessive boyfriend has been romanticised. The person who “just cares too much” has been romanticised. Intensity has been mistaken for chemistry. Constant contact has been mistaken for closeness. And social media has given all of it new tools…

When access becomes proof of love

Think about how strange some of our modern definitions of trust have become.

We say: If you trust me, you'll give me your password. If you have nothing to hide, you'll share your location. If you loved me, you'd tell me who you're talking to. If you cared, you'd answer immediately.

The logic sounds almost impossible to argue with because it has been built around a word nobody wants to challenge: Trust.

Patel says young people are increasingly socialised to accept surveillance as ordinary. Password sharing becomes a sign of trust. Location tracking becomes safety. Constant messaging becomes intimacy.

But there is a question hidden underneath all of this:

"If I have to surrender my privacy to prove that I love you, what exactly am I proving?"

Trust cannot mean that another person has unlimited access to you. And intimacy cannot require the disappearance of your boundaries. Patel puts it simply:

“A boundary is not a wall, it's a negotiation.”

That distinction may be one of the most important things young people can learn. You can love someone and still not want them to know where you are every minute. You can be committed and still have private conversations with your friends. You can have nothing to hide and still have a password they don't know. You can love someone deeply and still say no. And saying no should not create a crisis.

The body knows before the mind does

Perhaps the most compelling part of Patel's work is what happens when we stop thinking about digital abuse as something that happens on a screen.

Because the screen isn't where the abuse ends. It enters the body. Imagine your phone buzzing. You see the notification. Before you open it, you already know what kind of mood you're about to encounter. Maybe you were out with friends and didn't reply quickly enough. Maybe your partner has been waiting. Maybe they are angry. Maybe you have learned that silence will be punished. So you reach for the phone. Your heart rate rises. Your breathing changes. You begin constructing your response before you've even finished reading the message. You check your words. Then you check them again. You are no longer simply communicating. You are managing someone else's reaction to you. Patel explains:

“Young people feel the weight of TFIPV long before they can name it.”

A demanding message, a delayed reply, a video call demanded as proof of where they are: the body reads these as threat cues.

“A notification appears, and before there's even time to read it, the heart rate has already risen. Breath shortens.”

And unlike a traditional threat, this one doesn't necessarily end. Your phone is always there. The person is always reachable. There is always another notification. Another message. Another demand. Another opportunity to get something wrong.

Patel describes what happens when this becomes chronic:

“The body stops returning to rest and it stays braced, low-grade alert becomes the norm, and ‘calm’ starts to feel unfamiliar rather than restorative.”

As Patel puts it: 

“They have the symptoms: but not the diagnosis.”

That sentence changes how you think about anxiety. Because maybe someone doesn't say: My partner is controlling me.

Maybe they say: I'm exhausted. I don't know why I'm so anxious. I can't switch off. I keep checking my phone. I feel like I'm always doing something wrong.

Sometimes the body knows what the mind has not yet found the language to say...

The nine signs we don't always recognise as abuse

YSL Beauty's Abuse Is Not Love programme has identified nine warning signs of intimate partner violence and adapted them to the digital world. They include ignoring someone as punishment, blackmail, humiliation, manipulation, jealousy, control, intrusion, isolation and intimidation.

Some are immediately recognisable, others are not.

Intrusion can look like asking for a password.

Jealousy can look like asking why you liked someone's post.

Control can look like asking you to approve every photograph before you post it.

Isolation can look like asking you to leave a group chat.

Intimidation can look like a stream of demanding messages and the expectation that you respond immediately.

And manipulation: “If you loved me, you would give me your password.”

That is precisely why language matters. Patel says the nine-sign framework gives young people something they may never have had before: “The words.”

Because you cannot set a boundary around something you cannot identify.

The abuse doesn't need to leave a bruise

There is still a hierarchy in the way we understand abuse. Physical violence feels real. Digital control can feel somehow less serious. Perhaps because we have been trained to look for evidence that can be photographed. A bruise. A broken object. A visible injury.

But psychological control does not require physical evidence to be devastating.

Patel is emphatic:

“It is crucial to understand that TFIPV is not a separate or lesser form of abuse; it is intimate partner violence adapted to new tools.”

The perpetrator doesn't need to be physically present. A smartphone can extend coercive control across distance. Location tracking can create 24-hour surveillance. Messages can arrive at any hour. And because there is no physical mark, the experience can become harder for everyone around the victim to recognise and understand.

Patel describes the result as a sustained state of alarm and digital isolation that can establish severe control dynamics even before physical violence occurs. Which means that waiting until something becomes visibly violent is already waiting too long.

And now AI enters the relationship

Technology has already changed the mechanics of abuse, generative AI may change them again. Patel identifies three emerging forms of harm.

The first is deepfake extortion, where ordinary photographs can be manipulated into sexualised images and used to threaten or coerce someone.

The second is unsettling in a different way: AI can become a source of validation for the person doing the controlling.

Someone can ask a chatbot whether demanding their partner's password is reasonable. Whether restricting who they follow is justified. Whether jealousy is proof of love. And receive an answer that reinforces the behaviour. Then there is AI-generated intimacy.

Patel describes young people using large language models to compose seemingly thoughtful and personal messages:

“Their potential partner believes they're getting to know a person. They're getting to know an algorithm's best guess at what that person should say.”

We are only beginning to understand what that means. Because dating has always involved some degree of performance. We choose our best photographs. We think before we speak. We tell stories that make us sound interesting. But what happens when the person texting you can outsource the entire performance of emotional attentiveness to a machine?

"For young people already struggling to recognise TFIPV, AI adds a further dimension of harm that is difficult to identify and name."

We need to teach a different definition of love

Abuse rarely begins with the worst thing someone will eventually do. It often begins almost without really noticing.

A question. A demand. A password. A little jealousy. A location request. A message that needs answering immediately.

Something that makes you uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to leave, because it still feels like love. That is why prevention matters. Young people are capable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, but the culture around them has sometimes made the difference deliberately difficult to see.

Patel says that abuse is often masked as love, which is precisely why recognising the early signs can be such a powerful prevention tool. And perhaps the most important lesson isn't simply to identify control. It is to understand what healthy intimacy should feel like instead.

It should leave room. For privacy, for friendships, for silence, for disagreement, for a life that exists outside the relationship, for the freedom to say no, for the knowledge that being loved does not mean being permanently available…

And perhaps, most importantly, for the understanding that you can love someone without giving them unrestricted access to you.

Love should not require constant proof of innocence, and intimacy should not feel like surveillance.

Nina Patel's final message is perhaps the simplest place to leave this:

“A surveilled relationship is not a safe relationship. Abuse is not love.”

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Photo © Gena Malinin and Chunjie Liu photographed by Richard Burbridge