If someone would tell me they love me, I would wonder what they are trying to get out of me. At one point in time, I wanted nothing more than to be loved. But after enough experiences, I learned that is impossible. I am not lovable at all. Believing otherwise is a trap like believing you can be friends with NTs or that you as an autistic are safe at work. I killed that hope along with the others. As far as I can tell, life is a competition in which everyone is trying to win by taking others down. If you don't play, you get taken down just like that little religious community in Game of Thrones that didn't believe in weapons and were massacred. Keep your distance, don't get attached to anything, and if something matters to you, keep that s**t a secret from everyone.
I don't get it. I feel like the whole love thing is a societal level lie that everyone plays along with to either believe in a collective lie to distract from reality, or they think everyone else is in love and they're just not trying hard enough. I look at people that say they love each other. They don't act like it though. They hurt each other, they control each other, they lie, they manipulate, they cheat...I really can't think of any couples that treat each other like I would expect people to treat each other when they love each other. I'm seriously trying to think of just one couple rn, and I can't...okay, I thought of one: my adoptive parents. They had their issues, but I could tell they loved each other. No one could say one bad thing about the other, they never ever EVER insulted each other (I can't even imagine that happening), they never threatened to leave each other, they never cheated or even made a comment that could be misunderstood as flirting to someone else, they slept in the same bed every single night, and they hugged and kissed each other all the time. Oh! And my college girlfriend's parents. They loved each other too, though even I could tell her mother was a basket case. Outside of that, I cannot think of any couples that honestly loved each other.
Some couples put up a good show in public, but after spending sometime with them, it was obvious they hated each other, were constantly in competition for power, were more in a business contract than a marriage, or were just miserable people. Love isn't the norm. It's the rare exception. There are more people cheating on or abusing each other than there are people that honestly love each other, by magnitudes.