She Picked Your Pocket: You Called It Love

There is a particular kind of theft that happens in broad daylight, on a crowded bus, while you are looking at your phone or staring out the window at the harbour. You feel nothing. You notice nothing. And then later, when you reach into your pocket for something you needed, it is simply gone.

I think about that a lot. Not the bus. The other kind.

Two people were arrested off the Valletta routes this week after CCTV caught them working the crowds — the classic duo, one to distract, one to take. Clean, practiced, invisible in the moment. By the time anyone noticed, the damage was done and the perpetrators were already two stops ahead.

Pickpocketing is one of the oldest metaphors in the relationship vocabulary, and I am going to use it anyway because it is accurate. The people who take the most from us are rarely the ones who announce their intentions. They are the ones who create a small commotion — charm, intensity, the feeling of being completely seen — while the other hand is doing something else entirely. You are busy being chosen. You do not feel the lift.

I have sat with enough people in my clinic to know that this is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of attention — and attention, in the early stages of something that feels significant, is almost impossible to maintain. The neurochemistry of new love (dopamine flooding, cortisol spiking, the prefrontal cortex effectively going offline) is not designed to protect you. It is designed to attach you. The part of your brain that would normally notice inconsistency, that would clock the small contradictions between what someone says and what someone does, is running at reduced capacity precisely when you need it most.

What the pickpocket knows — and what the emotionally dangerous partner knows, usually without knowing they know it — is that distraction is the mechanism. Create enough warmth, enough urgency, enough of the feeling that *this is different, this is real, this is the one,* and the other person will stop guarding what matters. They will open. And open is exactly what you need them to be.

The Dutch pulled out of Eurovision this week, citing the contest's loss of neutrality — the sense that what was once a safe, shared space had become a stage for things it was never built to hold. I found myself thinking: yes. I know that feeling. There are relationships like that too. Spaces that were supposed to be neutral, safe, chosen — that slowly, incrementally, become something else. And you stay because you remember what it was. Because leaving feels like admitting you were wrong to believe in it.

You were not wrong to believe in it. The belief was real. What you were wrong about was the other person's capacity to honour it.

The hardest thing I tell clients, and the truest thing, is this: you do not need to have been naive to have been robbed. Skilled thieves target the attentive just as readily as the distracted. What they rely on is not your stupidity. It is your humanity — your willingness to be present, to be open, to stop guarding yourself long enough to let something in.

That willingness is not a flaw. It is the only way love is possible.

But here is the uncomfortable part, the sentence I need you to sit with: most of us, if we are honest, had a moment — one quiet, quickly suppressed moment — where we felt something was off. Where the story did not quite add up. Where the hand moved just slightly faster than it should have. We noticed. We chose not to.

That is not a reason for self-blame. It is a reason for self-knowledge.

The next time you feel that flicker — the one you usually talk yourself out of — do not talk yourself out of it. It is not paranoia. It is your prefrontal cortex, finally back online, trying to tell you something important.

The pickpockets got caught on camera. Your instincts are the camera. Learn to trust the footage.

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*Elena Vella is a licensed relationship and family therapist based in Malta.*