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What does the following mean?

Trip wires fill this house with tip-toed love.


It's a part of Eminem song "Guts over Fear". Previous and next sentences are as:

"I didn’t wanna go another round

An angry man's power will shut you up

Trip wires fill this house with tip-toed love

Run out of excuses with every word

So here I am and I will not run"


I looked the words and phrases on internet and came to this:

trip wire (tripwire?): a low-placed concealed wire used especially in warfare to trip an enemy or trespasser and usually to trigger an alarm or explosive device when moved

tiptoe: to walk on your toes with the heel of your foot lifted off the ground, especially in order not to make a noise.


I have absolutely no idea how to paraphrase this sentence.

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I'm not sure whether this spills into Lit Crit, but here goes.

The context of the song is self-doubt or even dysfunctional relationships:

Cause any time things went wrong
I was the one who they would blame it on

Having the house filled with trip-wires refers to the situation where just about everything he does results in him getting blamed. It's like having trip-wires everywhere, linked to booby-traps - even innocent steps produce painful results.

"Tip-toed love" extends this metaphor. In the booby-trapped house, he needs to walk extremely carefully (tip-toe) in order to move successfully from one place to another. The word 'love' refers to the manner in which members of the household relate to one another. It may not be 'love' in the traditional sense, but that's all they have.

This links back to the song's title, "Guts over Fear". Instead of living in fear of all the booby-traps, he's decided to be brave, to remain instead of to run.

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