A denunciation of love

So.

You're back so soon?

Well, let's do it. You don't want to work, neither do I. Let's rock!

Love.

About half of all music is related to it. Of that, a third speaks about how the singer wants it, another about how the singer no longer wants it, and the rest about how nice it was to be in love and how sad the singer is that it ended.

That's it. Delete love and the careers of a lot of musicians will fade into nothingness.

Love is a huge part of the human experience. It's unique in that people actively seek it and crave it.

Walk around for an hour and you'll see a lot of people. Most of them will not very secretly want that experience.

The ultimate human experience?

Fuck no.

I like to imagine the origins of love in a lifelong relationship like swans have. Swan meets swan. Cat? Swan? Yes, swan. Swan calls her and puff, there you have it: love.

That's how catcalling works, right? It's not pointless violence for the sake of violence, right?

Right?

RIGHT?

Then the swans decide they can't live without each other and proceed to spend their long, terrifying lives together, and then, when one of them dies, the other behaves just like an Evanescence song feels, and it's downhill from there.

Sounds similar?

It gets worse.

I think—and yes, this is a recurrent subject in this space—that the modern world has eroded the way we function deeply.

Hell, pray tell me, when was the last time that you, children of the modern age, touched dirt, saw a cow, tipped said cow?

And as a response, our brains have turned some parts of us to 10.

Have you noticed how encyclopedic and, if I may, standardized perversion has become?

Twenty years ago people were just as perverted, but perversion was a back-alley deal and you needed to really dig to find it.

I know because I did.

Now?

There's sex shops everywhere, and even the more twisted sexually adjacent concepts have not only a name, but a very organized wiki, a dedicated and professional community of followers, a standard rule set that comes from aggregated experience, and a list of alarm signs that mean you have to go to the emergency room.

And you learn to listen, gravely, when a grizzled-eyed veteran tells you:

"Nipple clamps shouldn't have an edge, and that needs a flared base."

Something similar has happened to love, and it really, really needs a flared base.

Bear with me.

Heh.

Bear.

Before the Industrial Revolution, love kind of made sense. It was linked to survival, to the sacrificial instincts that move people to hold the fort through the winter and that fostered the kind of families that were needed to manage huge extensions of land with a couple of shovels, a steer, and good intentions.

I'm not sure it has a consistent place in our world because love is the end of rationality.

If we evolved, why hasn't love evolved with us?

Modern-day relationships are plagued with the same problems any programmer with a sweet tooth has when he goes to the store: the three sides of bad decision-making.

Choice overload.

Choice fatigue.

Choice paralysis.

There are just so many people, so many options, and even if some are kind of crazy, some irredeemably evil, and some just kind of direct you to self-destruction, even so, most of those "options" that are really people are warm, kind, and delightful.

And you can call it quits when it stops feeling good.

Sounds great?

Let's see how love dies and what replaces it.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we set out to end scarcity and instead we created abundance.

And given that I haven't said "it doesn't matter" yet and we're about halfway in, it shows that I consider this good!

We had to make the choice between tribalism and primitive conceptions or the scary and possibly dystopian illusion that is the future, and we embraced it.

But love just didn't evolve fast enough, and this is where I try to make my point.

Put the pitchfork away.

Fairytale love is not unheard of in our time.

Couples that seem to exist for each other, look always perfect together, and probably have perfectly matching bacterial colonies in their bodies, and look just so cute together that they don't look capable of sex at all.

Well, they're capable.

Very capable.

And they like it dirty.

I don't trust those couples, but I'm a cynical asshole and, in my experience and in what I've seen, it's way more common to fall into relationships that are toxic, overburdened by jealousy, excessively possessive, and plagued by insecurity.

And this is apparently more true from men to women.

The explanation seems to be simple:

Two hundred years ago, boy meets girl, boy gives girl's father 100 camels and 50 cows, boy owns girl, girl never goes out of the home again.

Everyone is perfectly happy and faithful.

(Except the girl, but who cares what she thinks? It's 200 years ago.)

Our cultural tendencies, the way we learned to love from our parents, the media, books, and just general culture, lean towards monogamous, possessive, dominant love in which one of the lovers, probably the woman, has to sacrifice everything for the good of "the couple," that mythical entity that eats everything.

I've seen more than a couple of my own relationships crash and burn exactly over that.

One of the biggest and more damaging fights I had with one ex I loved very much was because, living together, I insisted on taking care of myself in my own time when I couldn't take care of both of us.

Say, when I got up at 4 a.m. to code a project or something.

The idea that my life was not her responsibility and that she had no obligation to take care of me was as world-shattering for her as the idea of a full-grown adult having to take care of another grown adult just because she happened to be a girl and it was socially expected.

Obviously, she moved on to a completely different relationship with a guy that actually wanted her to do everything for him, and then she got tired.

But we wish her well.

The stories I can tell about what people believe love allows or enables them to do to the target of their love are endless and scary, and it's because we have linked a lot of moral, social, and even religious expectations with the idea of love.

Am I a flower child advocating for free love without responsibility?

Am I about to start singing "Make Love, Not War"?

Maybe.

I'd look amazing dressed like a hippie.

Our world is today as rich, as populated, and as modern as it has ever been.

At least that's what the evidence tells us.

And we need to start looking the part.

I am filled with a red rage every time I hear about a person beaten or murdered by a partner in a fit of jealousy, but even more when an allegedly civilized being says something like:

"Good. That was deserved."

(They are usually not that nice.)

It fills me with disgust when I see a person getting "baby trapped" by another, and it happens both ways.

Imagine your whole existence being reduced to:

"I wanted to make your daddy/mommy never leave."

And frequently the second half is:

"And I failed."

And then pearls of wisdom like:

"If you had been smarter, prettier, cuter, nicer, daddy/mommy would have stayed."

Why is there something so extraordinary about love as a concept that takes people to such limits, makes them do such unimaginable acts in its name?

Is love at this point good, or just a bloody idol at whose feet we sacrifice the people we covet because we can't tolerate the idea of change being natural and everything ending?

Are we afraid of loneliness?

Would that be love or just a manifestation of closeness?

Is the loved person perfectly replaceable with anyone?

I decided to publish this close to my other piece defending alcohol because I failed to defend alcohol in that one, and I failed to condemn love in this one.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of love.

It's all the execution.

Just like the problem with religion.

And what is romantic love but a private religion of two, or a few, in which each part worships the other, themselves, and that precious reaction just in the middle that shines in a unique shade of pink depending on the people involved?

The next 50 years will bring a lot of change to humanity, and I hope to see grow a society that focuses less on love—what it is, what it owns—and just feels it more.

In the end, love is a chemical reaction in the brain telling you to reproduce.

It's literally evolution blowing a horn in your ear and telling you:

"It's time to get naked."

That's it.

All the rest—the complexities, the violence, the anger, the unhappiness—come from other places, and they need to go because the concept of love needs to expand or disappear.

Where should it start?

Probably with this quote:

"If you love a flower, don't pick it up.

Because if you pick it up, it dies and it ceases to be what you love.

So if you love a flower, let it be.

Love is not about possession.

Love is about appreciation."

— commonly attributed to Osho

And always remember:

True love doesn't hurt.

Unless you want it to, in that very special, very dirty way.

You know the one.

Peace.