Disposable Love
Modern love needs to be disposable — else the person would be called a supplicant.
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Something called love, in popular language, seems like a remarkably disposable and perhaps highly deceptive entity.
That deception partly arises from the fact that the term itself attempts to encompass too much. It stretches from lust to genuine affection, from messy attraction to the spiritual anesthetics of the religious people.
Linguistically, when a single word is tasked with carrying the weight of evolutionary biology, societal stability, spiritual meaning, and fleeting desire, it begins to collapse under its own weight — cheapening the concept itself.
Despite its frequent use, it remains difficult to define with any precision.
At times, I find myself in disagreement with everyone — from sages to a roadside boy flirting with his girlfriend. Because understanding requires distance, not immersion. If you press a word too close to your eyes, it blurs. Move it too far away, and it disappears. Clarity exists somewhere in between.
It resembles a piece of furniture labeled “beautiful” — and it is, but only in the way rusty iron can be, when wrapped in bright, colorful paper.
We give gentle names to harsh realities — moving on, protecting one’s peace, finding oneself again. But in truth, it is replacement driven by unmet emotional and bodily needs.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Searching for a partner is pragmatism. Human beings have emotional and romantic needs, and they seek to satisfy them.
The problem begins when this process is branded as something pure.
A biological heuristic is elevated into something transcendental. A functional mechanism is presented as sacred.
Reducing something to its mechanics does not necessarily devalue it.
Music is vibrating molecules. Life is a system sustaining a conscious machine.
Technically true. But not the reason they matter.
Music matters because it expresses what cannot be spoken. Life matters because it is experienced, not merely operated.
And love — if it is to matter at all — must be understood the same way.
Yet what is often called love offers something far more limited: a person available for emotional and physical intimacy, someone willing to invest time in maintaining a shared illusion of permanence.
It reassures the uncertain — a quiet guarantee that one’s value has not entirely eroded. Even in its most celebrated forms, love operates with quiet utility. It stabilizes, motivates, soothes — but rarely transcends.
None of this is immoral. None of it is surprising. But it is limited.
Love is not the end of a person’s journey. It is not even the beginning.
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It is, at best, a negotiated alignment of needs — temporary, functional, and often mistaken for something far greater.
I sometimes suspect that what people refer to as love, and what they actually feel, are fundamentally different. What they experience may not be love itself, but one of its symptoms.
In practice, we define love axiomatically — as something that brings peace, belonging, relief, and happiness. But that assumption itself is revealing, because no one truly knows what love is.
When did love ever promise happiness?
What did Krishna gain from loving Arjuna — or Radha? Not comfort. Not stability. Not fulfillment.
What emerges instead is conflict, separation, longing — something far closer to suffering than serenity.
And yet, that is precisely where the beauty of those stories lies.
If such a story existed today, it would likely be rewritten in softer terms — Radha would be called “pragmatic,” and Krishna as someone who “moved on,” and built his own legacy, both framed as emotionally mature individuals adapting to reality.
Perhaps that is what we do best — not understanding love, but reshaping it until it no longer disturbs us.
Stripping it of any cosmic weight, until it becomes something that can be disposed of without consequence.
This disposal, however, is not a bug in the modern machinery of romance; it is its defining feature. Under the invisible hand of modern culture, love has been quietly and entirely subsumed into the capitalist framework.
It is no longer a bond forged in shared sacrifice, but a marketplace governed by the ruthless laws of supply, demand, and diminishing returns. We now approach human connection with the same psychology we use for consumer goods. Browse digital profiles like storefront windows, scrolling through faces and bios, evaluating potential partners as emotional assets. What is the return on investment? What are the emotional overhead costs?
If the margins of happiness grow too thin, or if the maintenance becomes too demanding, we simply liquidate the asset. We label this swift discard with therapeutic buzzwords — “setting boundaries” or “outgrowing the connection” —, but it is often just the logic of consumerism applied to a human. We are merely practicing planned obsolescence on each other.
Genuine care requires friction. It demands patience, the endurance of another’s flaws, and the absolute willingness to be inconvenienced. But modern love violently rejects inconvenience. We have constructed a system where intimacy is expected to be as frictionless as next-day delivery.
At its core, much of what we call love today is merely a transaction of convenience and sexual gratification, efficiently packaged to avoid the messy, exhausting labor of true devotion. We seek the warmth of a body and the intoxicating dopamine of being desired, but we demand it without the binding contract of unconditional presence.
Perhaps the cruelest aspect of this transactional connection is how brilliantly it mimics genuine care when it requires something from you. It reaches out in the dark, asking for time, energy, and presence, wrapping its demands in the warm language of affection. But true care sustains itself when the hands are empty.
Modern love, however, vanishes the second its appetite is satisfied. When a person’s emotional or situational need for you is over, the silence that follows is deafening. You are left to realize that you were not a person to them at all, but a resource. Once the resource is depleted or no longer required, the connection is effortlessly discarded, leaving you to mourn a bond that only ever existed as a transaction.
Yet, the human ego is far too fragile to admit that it is merely shopping for a temporary companion to satisfy biological and logistical urges. We cannot stomach the reality of our own pragmatism.
And so, we dress up this transactional exchange in the language of the divine. We borrow the vocabulary of the sacred to mask the mundane. We speak earnestly of “soulmates,” “twin flames,” and “the universe bringing us together.” We drape our entirely secular, need-based arrangements in spiritual garments to convince ourselves that our consumer choices are ordained by destiny.
It is a brilliant, collective self-deception: taking a mutually beneficial arrangement of convenience and sexual utility, and artificially inflating it into a profound, cinematic romance.
When the utility runs out — when the convenience fades, or the physical novelty wears off — the “sacred” veil is swiftly dropped. The soulmate becomes a stranger. The transcendental connection becomes a lesson learned.
In the end, modern love might be the ultimate capitalist triumph. It has commodified the deepest human yearning, turning intimacy into a subscription service — easily canceled when the features no longer excite, quickly replaced by a newer model, leaving us perpetually consuming, yet perpetually starved.
Perhaps the disturbing part is this: even after understanding all of this,
We will still search for it — and still choose to believe.
