I Thought It Was Love, ..... But It Was a Barouche

In the aftermath of the painful separation from his first wife, Sting, leader of The Police, wrote Every Breath You Take, one of the most famous songs of the 1980s, recorded in 1983 on the album Synchronicity. He himself recounts that he woke up in the middle of the night with that phrase in his head and sat down at the piano; half an hour later the song was ready. “My intention was to write a romantic, seductive, enveloping and intimate song. Then I realized that inside it there was also another side of my personality, that of control and jealousy.”

In fact, what many consider a delicate and catchy love song is, to say the least, disturbing: “Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I’ll be watching you.” It gets worse with the chorus, “I look around but it’s you I can’t replace,” with the woman reduced to an object and the persecutor elevated to a victim. If we strip away the melody and Sting’s voice and imagine the same words written in an anonymous letter, we can almost feel the constant state of anxiety and fear experienced by victims of stalking, a crime provided for and punished under Article 612-bis of the Criminal Code. Sting himself said he was astonished by the warm reception from the public: “I think the song is very, very sinister and ugly; people have actually misinterpreted it as a sweet little love song, when it’s exactly the opposite. A couple once told me, ‘Oh, we love that song, we played it at our wedding!’ I thought: Well, good luck.”

So why has this Police classic been misunderstood for so long? And nowadays how many people would judge a promise of persecution as romantic? According to the latest research by Donne in Rete (2025), 48% of girls between 16 and 20 consider it acceptable to be monitored on social media by their partner. Even geolocation is considered normal, almost proof of love. A sign that psychological violence is not always perceived as such. Italy, in particular, is one of the few European countries, together with Cyprus, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, that has not introduced sexual and emotional education in schools as a compulsory subject.

Showing us the thousand faces of violence, with no distinction of gender, is lawyer and civil-rights activist Cathy La Torre, who in her book Not Normal draws a clear line between what is love and what is crime. Because it can happen to all of us, men and women, to stumble over words or gestures that seem innocent and commonly accepted, but in reality contain the seed of violence, a bit like Sting’s song, making us forget that true love, in any kind of relationship, teaches us to fly and makes us strong precisely because it feeds on freedom, as the Argentine poet Borges wrote: “With every farewell you learn. And you learn that love is not leaning on someone and that company is not security. And you begin to learn that kisses are not contracts and gifts are not promises.”

Mauro Tabasso
with Valentina Giaresti
NP November 2025