I recently finished reading a manga called Love Jinx, and the more I read, the more I started thinking about something completely different from the romance.
The story follows a guy who genuinely believes that kissing someone he loves will somehow cause something bad to happen.
Maybe they’ll break up.
Maybe something will happen to him.
Maybe the relationship will fall apart.
Whatever the outcome is, he has experienced enough bad things after previous relationships that he has convinced himself there is a connection.
He has a jinx.
At least, that’s what he believes.
And honestly, I understood why he believed it.
When something happens repeatedly, it’s very easy to start looking for a pattern.
If every time you do something, something unpleasant follows, eventually you stop asking whether the two things are actually connected.
You just accept that they are.
It reminded me of someone saying, “Every time it snows and I go outside, I fall.“
After enough falls, you might start believing snow is your problem.
But maybe it isn’t.
Maybe you’re walking differently because you’re afraid of falling.
Maybe you’re tense.
Maybe you’re paying so much attention to the possibility of falling that you’re no longer walking naturally.
And then you fall again.
So now the belief becomes even stronger.
“See? I knew it.”
That was how I started understanding the character’s so-called jinx.
It wasn’t really a curse.
It was trauma.
Or, at least, it was a learned fear that had become so deeply attached to his experiences that he could no longer separate the two.
And the story made that especially clear when we learned about his previous relationship.
He hadn’t simply experienced a few unlucky breakups.
He had been in an abusive relationship.
His partner would become violent when he spent time with friends. There was manipulation, fear, and the constant possibility that something terrible would happen because of something completely normal.
So when he eventually met someone new, it made sense that he was terrified of repeating the past.
The kiss wasn’t actually the thing he was afraid of.
What he was afraid of was what the kiss represented.
Another relationship.
Another attachment.
Another opportunity to be hurt.
Another person who could leave.
Another situation where he could lose control.
And then something beautiful happened.
He kissed someone.
And nothing happened.
No accident.
No attack.
No sudden disaster.
He didn’t lose his job.
The relationship didn’t immediately collapse.
The person didn’t disappear.
They stayed.
And what I liked most was that this person didn’t simply tell him, “You’re wrong. There is no jinx.“
They showed him.
There is a huge difference between telling someone they’re safe and consistently behaving in a way that allows them to feel safe.
Sometimes reassurance isn’t a sentence.
Sometimes it’s repetition.
“I am still here.”
And then again tomorrow:
“I am still here.”
And again.
And again.
Until eventually, the person’s brain starts believing what their fear had been telling them wasn’t possible.
That made me think about the little “jinxes” we sometimes create in our own lives.
I have had one myself.
For a long time, I had this idea that if I was planning something really important—something that could potentially change my life—I shouldn’t tell people about it.
Because once I said it out loud, I felt like something would happen.
The plan would fail.
Something would go wrong.
The opportunity would disappear.
So my solution was simple:
Keep quiet.
Don’t tell anyone.
Protect the idea until it becomes real.
For a while, that felt like the safest thing to do.
But eventually I started questioning it.
Was telling people actually the problem?
Or was the problem who I was telling?
Because when I really thought about it, there are people I can tell something to who might actually contribute to it.
Someone might give me advice.
Someone might know a tool I need.
Someone might have a useful strategy.
Someone might connect me to the right person.
Someone might even be able to provide financial support or another resource.
In those situations, keeping quiet isn’t protecting my plan.
It might actually be limiting it.
So I started looking at the situation differently.
Instead of thinking, “I can’t tell anyone because something bad will happen,” I can ask:
“Why am I telling this person?”
“What are they contributing?“
“Do I trust their intentions?“
“Will sharing this help me move forward?“
That feels very different.
I’m not saying every fear is imaginary.
I’m not saying every repeated negative experience is something we’ve invented in our heads.
And I’m definitely not saying people should ignore their instincts.
Sometimes patterns are real.
Sometimes people really are harmful.
Sometimes keeping something private is the smartest decision you can make.
But I think there is value in questioning the story we tell ourselves about why something keeps happening.
Because sometimes we call something a jinx when it is actually fear.
Sometimes we call it bad luck when it is actually a pattern.
Sometimes we call it intuition when it might be an old experience trying to protect us from something that isn’t happening anymore.
And sometimes the only way to find out is to stop running from the thing we think is cursed and approach it differently.
That’s what I took from this story.
Not that everything we fear is inside our heads.
But sometimes the thing we have spent years avoiding isn’t actually the thing hurting us anymore.
Sometimes we’re carrying the memory of what happened long after the danger has passed.
And maybe healing begins when we finally give ourselves permission to discover that something can happen differently this time.
