That’s not love, CBS.

CBS’ 48 Hours tonight is about “breakup violence,” a descriptive enough term. The report centers on high school student Lauren Astley, who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 2011.

It’s an important issue to highlight, but the show’s title – “Loved to Death” – is incorrect, ill-considered, and counterproductive. The cultural and personal factors that lead people to abuse others or to hurt or kill the person who’s broken off with them are not love, and the show is inadvertently promoting harmful ideas by suggesting that violence is an extreme expression of love.

I’m going to include this video, which I hope isn’t seen as trivializing this violence (or worse, blaming women for remaining in dangerous situations) but as pointing to a cultural problem - the romanticization of painful relationships: