love

"If I wouldn’t want to do this for them, it’s not fair to ask for it myself," they think. But relationships aren’t about mirroring each other's exact wants — they’re about generosity, difference, and negotiating real needs.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

In this way, commitment becomes the deepest manifestation of freedom, not its enemy. To stay, not because you must, not because you fear the alternative, but because you want to, is an act of liberation. It is not submission; it is autonomy in duet.

Love can be delusional. It can be a trauma bond. It can be a performance of your own ideal self. Commitment, conversely, must stop being seen as the death of romance. Done well, it’s the scaffold love climbs. It’s the difference between a spark and a fire that keeps you warm. But this requires work – on ourselves, first. Not just learning how to... See more

Today’s illusion of freedom often conceals deeper constraints. We curate love the way we curate images: perfected, filtered, groomed for consumption. Dating apps present partners like products; emotional connection is evaluated with the logic of UX design. Love becomes performance before it becomes presence. We advertise desire before we experience... See more

Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex , exposed how women were taught to seek transcendence through being chosen, while men were taught to fear emotional dependence. Feminism questioned not love per se , but the unpaid emotional and physical labour women were expected to offer under the guise of commitment.

Plato saw love as a ladder toward the divine, a disruption meant to elevate. Commitment, meanwhile, was social glue: a civic duty, a property contract, a family alliance.

With the rise of the novel came the rise of interiority: people wanted not only to marry, but to be understood . The Romantic era took this further, turning love into a secular religion. It was no longer enough to find a spouse, one had to find a soulmate . Commitment was no longer a duty, now it had to be poetic, redemptive, symphonic.