Love Quote by Henry Ellis

Jealousy is a tidy self-justification dressed up as devotion, and Ellis nails the trick with that medieval “dragon”: a creature you imagine guarding treasure while it scorches the very ground it stands on. The line works because it frames jealousy as a form of moral theater. It doesn’t just happen to love; it claims to serve love, to be love’s security system. That “pretence” is the point. Jealousy isn’t merely fear of loss; it’s fear repackaged as loyalty, surveillance repackaged as care.

Ellis was writing in an era when psychology was trying to sound both clinical and culturally literate, borrowing mythic imagery to describe modern inner life. The dragon lets him dramatize a psychological paradox: the more jealousy tries to “protect” a relationship through control, interrogation, and possessiveness, the more it corrodes the conditions that make intimacy possible. Trust can’t be coerced; desire doesn’t thrive under audit. The slaying is rarely a single act. It’s the slow heat of suspicion, the constant demand for reassurance, the way the jealous person turns their partner into a suspect and themselves into a warden.

The subtext is also a warning about how easily people mistake intensity for proof. Jealousy feels energetic, vigilant, invested. Ellis suggests that’s precisely why it’s so dangerous: it provides emotional evidence for its own necessity while quietly rewriting love as ownership. The dragon survives by claiming it’s the guard dog; love dies because the home becomes a fortress.