Love, real love, isn't exactly convenient. It doesn't optimise well, and it certainly doesn't fit neatly into our increasingly algorithmic existence. Look around, and you'll see love packaged like a product—dating apps that promise perfect matches, Valentine's Day marketing that reduces intimacy to a consumable experience, "relationship hacks" designed to streamline the messiest, most unpredictable human connection imaginable.
There's this pervasive cultural myth that love should be frictionless. Swipe through options like a playlist, fine-tune preferences, eliminate any risk of fundamental disagreement or meaningful transformation. But what if love is supposed to be inconvenient? What if its very essence is to throw us completely off course?
Alain Badiou would argue that this is precisely the point. Love isn't about finding someone who "completes" you or settling into the comfortable illusion of a unified identity. It's about maintaining the Two—two distinct, irreducible perspectives colliding and creating something entirely new. As he puts it, "Love is a process that arranges immediate experiences of the like, without the law of these experiences being decipherable from within them." In other words, love reshapes how we experience life, even though we can’t fully understand it while we're in it.
This isn't just romantic poetry. It's a profound philosophical intervention.
Love, in Badiou's radical conceptualisation, isn't just a feeling. It's a truth procedure—a way of discovering reality from the perspective of Two rather than One. Just like science, politics, and art, love has the potential to reveal something fundamental about the world. It's a process, a commitment, a sustained act of truth-making. And truth, if it's real, is never easy.
Consider two ways of understanding love's role in humanity. One perspective—the feminine position—sees love as the knot that holds everything together. Science, politics, art: these make us human, but love binds them into a meaningful whole. It's the thread that unifies experience. Without it, our understanding fragments.
The masculine position, by contrast, treats love as just one truth among many—not a unifying force, but something that sits alongside other pursuits. This isn't about biological sex, but about positions in relation to truth.
This explains something fascinating about how culture frames love—the idea that emotional intensity is somehow "for women", while "serious" realms like science and philosophy remain untouched. But if love is a truth procedure capable of reshaping our understanding as profoundly as a scientific discovery or political revolution, then it demands serious philosophical consideration.
And this is precisely why love cannot be consumerist. Capitalism thrives on choice without commitment, on treating everything—including relationships—as a service meeting pre-determined expectations. Love, however, demands risk. It's not an experience of the other, but an experience of the world under the radical condition that there are Two.
Under capitalism, love gets flattened into compatibility—which is just another way of saying low risk, low effort, minimal disruption. It asks: "Does this person fit into my life?" rather than "Am I willing to let this encounter transform me?"
Real love doesn't promise comfort. It demands courage.
The modern dating world, with its algorithms and efficiency metrics, is built around the idea that love should be easy. But maybe that's precisely the sign that something's gone wrong. Maybe love isn't supposed to be a smooth ride. Maybe it's about learning to live in the Two, resisting the pressure to collapse difference into sameness.
As Badiou provocatively notes, "Capitalism couldn't care less about love. It prefers narcissism. It prefers rivalries. It prefers pornography." Consumerism wants desire without commitment, pleasure without risk. Love demands something entirely different—it demands a truth.
This Valentine's Day, the real rebellion isn't rejecting love. It's rejecting the idea that love should be easy, predictable, or safe.