“Cynicism about love leads young adults to believe there is no love to be found and that relationships are needed only to the extent that they satisfy desires. How many times do we hear someone say ‘Well, if that person is not satisfying your needs you should get rid of them’? Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. And friendships or loving community cannot be valued and sustained.” — bell hooks
I’ve always struggled to talk about love, but I always try to write what is true to me, no matter how messy it is and no matter how much it scares me. And what is scarier or messier than love?
The thing is, love has often been a source of turmoil for me, a persistent cycle of regret and agitation. I used to believe you were either good at love or you weren’t. That’s a lie, though. No one is simply “good at love.” Love is a skill. It requires the kind of active practice we usually reserve for our careers or our bodies. We aren’t, however, to blame for this misunderstanding of love. We are simply souls who bought into a collective delusion.
I see the fallacy for what it is now. Looking for “the one” is nothing but a never-ending search for compatibility that doesn’t exist. And this ongoing search is the root of the problem—not people.
I know how that sounds. It might force a reckoning with everything you thought you knew, or it might just make you want to tell me I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But look around.
The truth is, we’ve treated relationships like Dixie cups. As bell hooks noted, they have become disposable. If it does not work, you simply drop it and find another. Zygmunt Bauman called this “liquid love.” It flows easily, but it never holds its shape.
This isn’t just about romance. This mentality devalues everything it touches—friendships, community, the self. Optimization has become our God. We trade depth for efficiency, convinced that if we just find the perfect “fit,” the work will end.
But the work is the point.
We aren’t consumable goods. We are human fucking beings. We are too complex for the logic of the swipe or shallow DMs. Yet we’ve normalized all of this. We want a consumerist love, looking for the best features, low maintenance, and immediate results. We want what we paid for, off the rip, delivered with the efficiency of an Amazon package. When the product glitches, we don’t repair it. We don’t ride out the lows. We just replace. Rinse, wash, and repeat.
If we finally stop optimizing, what remains? The answer is devotion. Not obsession, not attachment, but devotion, the purest form of commitment.
We are the sum of everything we’ve endured: the trauma, the joy, the fears, and the dreams. Devotion is the active discipline of navigating that imperfection. It isn’t about settling for “less.” It’s about understanding that we all carry baggage that no amount of optimization can erase.
We’ve been told that if we climb high enough, if we just keep on searching, that one day we’ll be rewarded with lifelong peace. But that’s a fantasy, a delusional cloud of self-deception that has done more damage than good. You don’t search until you find someone who magically relieves you of the responsibility to try. Contentment does not lie in the exit, but in the spiritual resilience needed to stay and to build something through effort and care.
The modern world reinforces the fantasy. Everything must be maximized: the best workout, the perfect morning routine, the life-changing book stack. It never fucking ends. Inside this vortex of infinite possibility lies an insidiousness that drives me crazy. This is where decision fatigue and anxiety take root. It’s where cynicism is nurtured. The wandering eye and the FOMO aren’t just concepts. They are inescapable tendrils of temptation that make devotion feel impossible in our modern age.
It’s become harder to resolve conflicts with one another. Everything feels performative, and integrity has become abstract, a concept spoken about but rarely practiced. After all, what’s the point of something as difficult as integrity or resilience when the deceitful call of salvation from a swipe claims to hold the magic elixir?
So much of what we’ve normalized feels purely transactional. It’s the hollow logic of the upgrade. We stop seeing what someone is and only notice what they are not. No relationship can flourish under that kind of scrutiny. Scrutiny is easy. Commitment is hard. Without the willingness to ride out the choppy waters, we aren’t building relationships, we are just auditioning placeholders.
We are led to believe that more choice equals more happiness. We treat contentment like an infinity soda machine, a thousand flavors, but no real substance. In reality, infinite choice takes us further from tranquility. It pushes us toward anxiety, dissatisfaction, and paralysis. We have more freedom than ever to choose our partners, yet we are less happy.
Why? Because I think most people still don’t understand the weight of hitching their life to another. We are all complicated creatures, far more complex than the versions of ourselves we present at the start of a relationship. The challenge is navigating those complexities once the veil falls. The world will try to convince you that happiness lies just beyond Door #2, or #3, or #4, or #5. But it doesn’t. Happiness is not waiting behind a new door. It’s built, forged with the materials you already have.
Love is more than what we see in the movies and books. It’s more than the version capitalism sells us on Valentine’s Day.
Love is an education. It’s patience. It’s devotion.
It’s about becoming who you could be while helping another person do the same, the rare art of pulling off growth together. But in a world that demands we move more efficiently, that we optimize for every single thing, choosing imperfection feels like a liability. How do you stay vulnerable when the prevailing logic of our time says everything is disposable?
The answer is usually hidden behind a lie.
The culprit is romantic fantasy. We are sold the idea of the “soulmate,” a cosmic savior who will finally make life make sense. We are taught that once we find them, or they find us, the levels are cleared and the game is won. But the myth of the soulmate is actually one of the greatest hurdles to experiencing true love. It turns the necessary friction of a relationship into a sign that the relationship wasn’t “meant to be.”
To “fall in love” is to relinquish agency. And when we give up our power to a fantasy, we can never truly be content.
Love is not a fall, but a choice.
Choosing returns our agency to us, but it also demands personal responsibility. When you “fall,” everything is left to fate. If it fails, it isn’t your fault. This is how we justify disposability, by pretending we were never in the driver’s seat to begin with. Nothing grows inside a chamber of disposability. Bell Hooks defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” If growth isn’t happening, love isn’t present.
We are not perfect, yet we often expect others to be, or to at least get as close to perfect as we deem acceptable. We are distracted by the next shiny thing, rarely pausing to realize how difficult we are to live with, how hard we can be to love. We demand perfection from others while offering something far from that ourselves.
To endure, love requires the quiet, compassionate acceptance of imperfection. It is the realization that we are all unfinished, that we are constantly, and will always be, in a state of change. Each of us deserves a partner willing to offer that grace, but we must never forget the power we hold to extend it ourselves.
Devotion isn’t about settling. It’s not worshipping someone who treats you poorly. It is the active practice of patience for the imperfect. It is knowing someone’s heart well enough to see when it is doing its best. It is the grace to nudge them toward their potential and the compassion to hold them when they fall short of it.
Devotion doesn’t concern itself with compatibility, perfection, or the fleeting rampage of butterflies in your stomach. It has no use for optimization. It deals in the messiness of reality, the raw aliveness that only rewards those willing to strip themselves bare. It is the will to understand. It is finding benevolent reasons for unappealing behavior. This isn’t about excusing the abusive; it is about seeing a decent person and carving through the surface to the core, faults and all. It is the practice of cutting them slack because you recognize your own faults and level of complexity.
It is the hope that you, too, can be loved despite your own warts.
Beyond the algorithmic cesspool and the disposable nature of our time, isn’t this what we all crave? Not a life hack or an optimized system, but to be seen in our entirety, flaws and all, and to find someone devoted enough to stay.
Much love,
—Jon ♾️
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