On the Mass-Marketing of Love in the Age of Anxious, Noxious, Profitable Self-Maximization

I am of the age where people start to overanalyze. The low-res analogies for (inner peace) and (attracting a soulmate) and (things happen for a reason) all make my vision blurry, not entirely unlike the section of the corporate bookstore where diet books are all lumped together. Everything looks glossy and sits on heavy paper so that it will seem more legitimate. It’s not.

Something messy being made palatable, profitable even, and something being real? Two different things. I am nauseated that we let our most important emotion be plastic-wrapped because of it.

What I’d much prefer is some honesty: It’s all luck. Be a good person. Shit will happen. Not all of us will end up loved or even liked, and that outcome doesn’t have a thing to do with the verbiage or mindset of looking for an “adventure partner” vs. “life partner” vs. “soul mate” vs. “hookup” vs. “I swiped right.” Well-intentioned people change the window dressing as often as they’d like but for God’s sake, I yearn for the quiet to parse out the real content of what’s happening. Your memes with scrolled fonts and Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes are bright baubles in the way of the reality that love isn’t ours for the taking.