Your kid is at college. They haven't texted in two days. You check your phone every twenty minutes. You tell yourself this is love. The checking, the slight nausea, the way your day reorganizes around their next message — this is love, expressed through care. Maybe. Or it's love with attachment doing most of the work, and attachment running on fear.
K had a brutal eye for attachment. He didn't call it love. He called it fear with a face. The face was the other person, the spouse, the child, the friend, the job, the home. Each of them had become a stand-in for something the self needed in order to feel intact. Lose the face and the self destabilizes. The reaching for the face is the fear of the destabilization.
Attachment looks like love because it has the same external behaviors. Care. Devotion. Sacrifice. The internal mechanism is different. Love, in K's vocabulary, can survive the other person leaving. Attachment can't. Attachment requires the other to stay in their position so the self can stay in its position. The dependency is mutual, not in the romantic sense, in the structural sense. Both parties are propping each other up against a fear neither has examined.
The body of attachment is restless. The phone gets checked. The seat gets unsettled. The day reorganizes around the absent face. Underneath is a low-grade dread. Not for them, exactly. For yourself. For what you become if they don't come back. The dread is the giveaway. Love doesn't need the other one to come back to keep being love. Attachment requires it.
Every attachment is a hostage situation. The hostage is the part of you that needs the other one to stay still. K wasn't against love. He was against the fear-with-a-face that walks around calling itself love and convinces everyone, including the lover.