The Case Against Love

Love is easy to defend in theory. The case against it is built in lived experience. Cynicism has nothing to do with it. It’s data. The way desire corrupts judgment. The way hope turns minor inconsistencies into narrative. The way people use intimacy as leverage and call it connection. Love makes intelligent people act against their own interests. It changes your threshold for acceptable behavior. You begin to assume that fear is simply the price of being known.

Love fails predictably, yet we refuse to examine the proof. We mistake the neurochemical surge for meaning. We confuse the relief of being temporarily less alone with actual compatibility. Someone meets us at our most vulnerable during a breakup, a career failure, a Thursday in March when nothing feels reliable, and we interpret their presence as proof of something larger. This is magical thinking dressed in the language of connection. We build entire futures on the foundation of good timing. We call this romance when it is really just two people arriving at the same need simultaneously, each willing to ignore what doesn’t fit the story they need to tell themselves about not being as lost as they actually are.

Or maybe this reading is itself a distortion. Maybe the skeptic simply lacks the capacity to recognize what others feel instinctively. There are people who meet at twenty-two and die at eighty-seven holding hands. There are moments that feel less like chance and more like memory. You walk into a room and someone’s inflection, their specific way of noticing light, the particular slant of their humor, all of it registers as familiar before you’ve learned their last name. Fate sounds ridiculous until you try to explain why this stranger’s presence feels like coming home. Soulmates sounds like delusion until you watch two people finish each other’s sentences for forty years. The cynic calls this confirmation bias. The believer calls it providence. Both are trying to make sense of the same unsettling phenomenon.

But then we arrive at the question of time. Does love require permanence to qualify as real, or can something be love even when it ends? We treat longevity as the ultimate proof, as if time validates what feeling cannot. A relationship that lasts five years and then dissolves gets retroactively downgraded. We say it wasn’t real love it was infatuation. Projection. Convenience. As if the intensity you felt at year three becomes fraudulent the moment someone leaves at year six. This is how we protect ourselves from the more destabilizing possibility that love can be completely genuine and still expire. That you can know someone truly, love them accurately, and yet reach a point where the bond that felt essential simply vanishes. We need love to be eternal because temporary love implies that our feelings, however profound, might just be circumstantial. And if love is circumstantial, then what we built our lives around was never as solid as we believed.

The real question might be whether people are capable of the discipline love requires. We assume monogamy is natural when behavior suggests it’s demanded. Something you will into existence and maintain against the grain of impulse. Temptation isn’t an exception to love. It’s the constant condition. Someone at work whose humor feels easy. A conversation at a party that reminds you what possibility feels like. The ex who texts at 2am when you’re fighting with your partner. Fidelity isn’t about not wanting other people. It’s about not acting on wanting other people, week after week, year after year, until you die or they do. We romanticize this as devotion when it’s really just sustained discipline. And discipline fails. Not always, but often enough that we pretend to be shocked each time it does. Maybe the case against love is that it demands a level of sacrifice most people aren’t built for. We want the feeling without the maintenance. The connection without the cost. Love asks you to choose the same person forever. Human nature gets bored.

It shouldn’t require this much vigilance. You should be able to trust without scanning for evidence. You should expect honesty without bracing for impact. The fact that love comes with constant calculation tells you something about its fragility. You measure their mood before asking for what you need. You edit your complaints to avoid triggering defensiveness. You monitor their stress levels to determine whether tonight is the night to mention the thing that’s been bothering you for weeks. We call this emotional intelligence. We frame it as consideration. But maybe it’s just survival instinct. Maybe after enough relationships, you realize that honesty is conditional. It arrives when convenient and disappears when the truth becomes too expensive. Love promises safety but delivers perpetual assessment. You’re more vulnerable than you’ve ever been, and the person who could hurt you most is the one you’re supposed to trust completely. The logic fails. We just pretend it doesn’t.

But then there are the couples who make it. The ones who simply won’t quit. The marriages that survive infidelity, illness, bankruptcy, loss. They exist. You see them everywhere, finishing each other's sentences after forty years. So what does that prove? That love works for some people and not others? That specific combinations require less compromise? Or that those couples made a choice the rest of us couldn’t sustain, to keep choosing each other despite every reason not to. Maybe the difference isn’t in the quality of love but in the tolerance for its failures. Some people can forgive what others can’t. Some people can overlook what others won’t. The love isn’t better. The capacity is just different. Which means the case against love ultimately stands. It’s just that some people proceed anyway.

So here I am. Armed with convictions, convinced by experience, certain that love fails more than it succeeds. The defenses raised. The conclusion drawn. And yet I keep watching couples at dinner, wondering what they know that I don’t. Keep building walls and calling it boundaries. The skepticism was supposed to be freedom. Instead it’s become its own prison. I can’t let anyone close enough to matter because mattering is the problem. Safety means distance. Distance means nothing happens. Nothing happening means I’m right about everything and alone with the victory. The case against love wins. The world moves on regardless.