In this paper I wish to contribute to critical geographies of love through a focus, somewhat paradoxically, on the experiences of those living with domestic violence. As noted by others, despite a now firmly established interest in emotions, geographers have given little explicit attention to the detailed performance of relationships of love or to their spatiality. Drawing on work with survivors of domestic violence, I argue that responses to fear can not be separated from the everyday routines and expectations of love in localized sites of body, home and community. I show how understandings of the rural and of gendered behaviour in the family contribute to the entanglement of love and violence and to the construction of ‘survivors’’ emotions and bodies as chaotic and contradictory.