Love cannot grow in a disposable culture
Love cannot survive infinite options, at least not in the way it is currently being asked to.
But the problem isn’t really the endless options themselves via a burgeoning, glittering online world where every next person becomes more intriguing than the last.
While optionality is a real problem in that it plays on our many weaknesses, the fundamental issue is that we have misunderstood what real love is, and that true depth and meaning in relationship is tied to a kind of hyper-particularity we have largely forgotten. Following on the very digital reality that has taken over our lives and cut us off so extensively from what is real, we experience people as replaceable, fungible, disposable, just like everything else we buy and eventually rid ourselves of. If we are unhappy or not quite satisfied, or someone displeases us, we perceive it is easy to go find someone else.
Ultimately, love can’t survive infinite options because we have already made ourselves vulnerable to a throwaway approach to relationships. In that context, options present themselves as ever better and settling into someone real never really arrives.
But the solution isn’t as complicated or impossible as we think. It will take some serious re-evaluation of our interior approach to all of life, but the beautiful thing is that once this moves into place, all of the options in the world won’t matter, because love will be nearly invincible.
I say “nearly” because we always have to allow for human frailty and vice. Life is unpredictable in many ways. But the reality is that we were made for love and for real, deep bonding, and with this confidence, we can truly hope and work build the real thing again.
Real relationships require inconvenience and endurance
There are a few foundational things we need to have in place for love to be possible, and some of it may seem tangential initially.
Keep in mind—none of these things promises a specific kind of romantic love, but it does form the foundation for it, as well as all kinds of satisfying, supportive relationships in and out of our families, in friendships, in general communities, and work and project collaborations.
We often underestimate the value of these other relationships, and we shouldn’t. Love is powerful wherever life gifts it to us, and our focus should be on becoming the kind of person capable of loving and noticing the others who can do the same. Beautifully, this also sets us up to meet and develop the kinds of romantic relationships we crave.
First, in a fundamental way, we have to find our way back to the clunkiness of reality before we can even discuss love at all.
Anything valuable will require effort, friction, inconvenience—even suffering. Distance from this friction-filled reality via the rapid, gratifying world online has long been forming our minds in a way that is counterproductive to love.
I know that a lot of people will balk at it, but the way we live becomes the way we live. One area habituating us in a certain direction means the other areas are affected, too. This isn’t inherently negative but the way a human person was designed to function. Most of us have had the experience of incorporating one or two good habits and watching that pour into the rest of our lives. And most of us have experienced some form of devastation when even just one area of our life becomes affected by vice. Ask the addict (which is all of us, too, in some way).
Thus, deliberately (and I would argue, heroically) incorporating aspects of suffering and inconvenience into our lives is one of the wisest things we can do to make love possible.
We have to divest ourselves of the idea that ease is the principal determining value of our lives. Conditioning ourselves away from this will look like intentionally slowing down in our day to day lives, and banishing the screens for at least occasional clumps of hours and occasional days. There is no such thing as a relationship without friction and discomfort, and especially not one we expect to last over decades. We have to rebuild our muscles for a bit of endurance. Comfort and convenience is robbing us of this capacity, and love is weak without it.
The irreplaceability of a person
Second, we will also have to divest ourselves of our tremendous self-focus, which, ironically, ultimately does not serve us.
As long as we are looking for someone to be an extension of our baby narcissism—signaling to others that we are valuable, or smart, or chic, or successful, or beautiful, or whatever—we cannot be looking for the right things that make for a warm and sincere, personal, lasting, intimate love. If we continue to hollow ourselves out through the attention-killing reality of our constant scrolling, we lose a sense of solid self, and this makes us increasingly more prone to valuing external signifiers. If we desire to love well, we must first start with an actual connection to our deepest selves rather than a materialist, abstract world that distracts us from a sincere interior life.
We need to develop a disposition of sobriety and gratitude, where we take the preciousness of a person seriously.
The person—every person—truly matters and is irreplaceable.
Now clearly not every person is meant for us in a lasting way, regardless of the relationship, but we have to recognize that they are, in fact, utterly irreplaceable. This is critical. Each person is a full universe of their own reality, and only this conception of the person makes it possible to feel no draw away from a commitment: regardless of how lovely or smart or beautiful or successful or even seemingly more compatible another person may be, they can, by definition, never be that person.
This is what sets the stage for believing in real love, and beginning to build it. We start to evaluate the person in our lives singularly, recognizing the relational capital we are building specifically with them, and in a way that is only possible with them. Yes, we can (and likely frankly should sometimes) discern that for a long-term relationship, perhaps things with that person can’t work. But this is a sober-eyed evaluation of the relationship itself and whether that person’s irreplaceability is something we can or cannot (or should or should not) live without. It’s not a cold dismissal of a person for some arbitrary, comparative inadequacy.
Essentially, we are deliberately shrinking our world to view and discern only the one in front of us on their own terms, listening to and cultivating the inner impression of the heart in our getting to know them, rather than filtering everything through some kind of cold, materialist, trait-optimizing spreadsheet. Love cannot grow in that context. Frankly, not even a good business can grow in that context.
Beautifully, however, this shrinking into focus is precisely what opens up the universe of a person to us, and the shocking beauty therein.
How real love survives modern life
From here, we can continue to cultivate an interior life that values reality, endures difficulty, and emphasizes the relationship itself over its external signaling, and a true relationship worth living for can emerge. This is the substrate.
From that disposition, and only possible then, do we start applying the relationship advice about intentional bonding, male/female dynamics, and the various structure and communication strategies for a relationship. With real love in place, focused on the irreplaceability of the person as well as ourselves, tools become useful.
So how does love survive infinite options?
By living as deeply human and opting out of them by default.
Real love takes root and then has no comparison.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 