There is a story we tell ourselves about love.
It goes like this: somewhere in the world there is « the one ». Someone you cannot live without. And when you find them, when everything aligns, you will finally be happy, complete, and capable of deep love.
This story is a lie.
Romantic love is a multi-billion dollar business, built on an illusion almost all of us have been taught to believe. This is not an opinion. It is a system we have been conditioned to accept from birth.
Once you see the pattern, you will recognize it everywhere. In relationships. In dating profiles. In songs. In movies. In captions about soulmates. The question is not whether love exists.
It does.
The question is what you have been taught to call love — and who benefits from that definition.
The Business That Built Itself on Your Belief
From childhood, we are told there is someone out there for us. We are programmed into this belief repeatedly. Religion echoes it. Music reinforces it. Films normalize it. Books romanticize it. Culture enforces it.
Why?
Come closer. Look at the scale. The wedding industry alone generates over 70 billion dollars annually. Dating apps generate billions every year through subscriptions. The jewelry industry is structurally built on engagement and marriage rituals. Greeting cards depend on romantic occasions. Flower markets peak on love-based holidays. Hotels profit from romantic travel. Entire segments of the cosmetics and fashion industries are tied to the idea of becoming « more desirable » to attract someone else.
Companies make billions of dollars from your heartbreak and your desire for love.
Therapists are paid to treat the pain left by failed relationships. Divorce lawyers profit when marriages end. Publishers, film studios, and music labels generate massive revenue by selling stories and songs built around romance.
The entire system depends on one idea: that romantic love is real, and that you need it to be happy.
To keep this system profitable, these industries must keep you searching for a partner. They must keep you believing that someone perfect is waiting for you, and that your life is incomplete without them.
The business model is not selling love. It is selling the belief in love.
History and culture reinforce this belief. Poems, reality tv, and speed dating shape perception and distract from the possibility that what you call love may not exist, and may instead be tied to biology, survival, and attachment to not lose access to what feels useful.
Women are heavily conditioned by Disney fairytales to believe in romance, which makes it difficult to consider alternatives when the programming started so early. It feels uncomfortable to question whether what we call love may not exist. It is also difficult to accept that someone only stays with you because of the resources or status you provide. And it is equally difficult to accept that someone does not love you back because you cannot provide what they need.
Most people prefer the more comforting version of reality, where romance feels meaningful and "magical". It feels better than the alternative, where it may also function as a system shaped by need, behavior, and consumption.
What we call romantic love is programming. It is not connection.
What we call romantic feelings and daydreaming are the projection of a life where your problems, your lack, are solved. Romantic love is, in reality, lack that has been rebranded with more appealing words like “desire” and “attraction”.
What is labeled “romantic love” is often a transactional exchange. And it is important to start seeing it for what it is: a negotiation of mutual utility where two incomplete people attempt to trade their individual voids for a feeling of wholeness.
Think about what actually happens when you experience what the system calls romantic love. You see someone attractive and feel drawn to them. That is desire. Your nervous system reacting to something you feel you lack: beauty, attention, status, security, validation, being chosen...ect.
When you imagine a life with someone wealthy and feel excited, that is not love. That is the fantasy of solving financial insecurity through their resources. The fantasy of not having to build security yourself because someone else provides it.
When you are attracted to someone successful and feel validated near them, that is not love. That is borrowing their status to feel important. Using their achievements to construct your own sense of value.
When you crave someone beautiful and imagine that being with them will boost your self esteem, that is not love. That is attachment built on validation. The belief that proximity to beauty transfers value to you.
These are all forms of lack, rebranded as “desire” or attraction. But attraction is often the movement of wanting something you believe you do not have and cannot generate yourself. The system teaches you to call this love because calling it desire would expose what it is.
Desire sounds transactional. Desire sounds like need. Desire sounds like dependence. Desire sounds like you are using another person to fix yourself. But love sounds noble. Love sounds spiritual. Love sounds selfless. Love sounds worth sacrificing for. Love sounds like destiny.
So desire is rebranded as love. And you spend your entire life chasing desire while calling it soulmates. You spend your life extracting from others while calling it romance. Once you understand this — once you see the mechanism underneath what we call love — you start noticing the same pattern everywhere. In real life relationships. Online relationships. Dating profiles. Love songs. Romantic movies. Instagram captions.
If you look at your own dating history, you start to see it clearly. With past relationships. With current ones. It becomes clearer when you stop using the word “love” and start observing behavior directly.
When you look back at those interactions, it becomes easier to see that both sides were often trying to resolve internal gaps through the other person.
You were not choosing them purely to support their growth. You were choosing them because they carried something you felt you did not have.
And they were doing the same.
That is the pattern.
Not connection as it is usually described — but exchange shaped by need, projection, and perceived value.
What we call love is often a cold calculation of social value. And the calculation is simple:
Does this person increase my value?
That is the question beneath many romantic decisions. Not “do I love this person.” Not “does this person inspire me.” Not “does this person help me grow.”
Does this person increase my value?
Both people run this calculation. Both evaluate the exchange. If the perceived value is too low — if the person does not add enough to their life — what is called “romantic love” becomes "complicated". If the perceived value is high then it is called a " committed relationship".
It becomes two people assessing each other, and deciding whether the exchange is worth continuing. They evaluate whether being together improves their situation enough to justify staying. They negotiate, directly or indirectly, for mutual utility. They build a life around it. They make promises about permanence.
But underneath the implicit contract is clear: I provide what you lack, and you provide what I lack.
Romantic, isn't ?
The Pattern in Entertainment That Mirrors Real Life
Pride and Prejudice is not about romance. It is about social climbing. Elizabeth marries Mr. Darcy for his wealth, status, and the validation of being chosen. Mr. Darcy marries Elizabeth because she has the energy and vitality his cold, depressed life lacks. Both act from need, not from wholeness.
Titanic is not a love story. Jack is a poor man with no status. Rose is trapped by her family’s wealth. She pursues Jack because he represents escape from her restrictive life. He pursues her because she is a high-status prize that gives him access to a world he cannot reach on his own. Both are using the other to obtain what they lack.
Every romantic film follows this same script. Two people who feel empty meet and mistake their ability to use each other for love. They label their codependence as romance and their desperation as connection. These industries make billions by selling the fantasy that this transaction is noble.
But it is not.
The Same Extraction Loop Repeating With Different Faces
People repeat the same loop of extraction, just with different faces and labels.
An unattractive person chases someone beautiful. They believe they can gain validation and some form of status. They call this “love at first sight.”
An attractive person chases someone equally beautiful. They believe they have found a perfect match. They call this “soulmates.”
A person with financial problems chases someone wealthy. They believe being with a rich person will solve their lack of money. They call this “the love of their life.”
An insecure person chases someone confident. They believe the other person’s presence will fix their lack of self-assurance. They call this “chemistry.”
A person who feels invisible chases someone with power or status. They believe being seen with someone important will make them important by association. They call this “twin flames.”
And this pattern continues across all variations of human needs. We want someone else to provide the value we have not built within ourselves. We lack awareness in this truth because we prefer the hope of a quick fix over the work of building our own worth.
How the Extraction Loop Actually Works
When we feel we lack value—whether money, status, beauty, confidence, or something else—we experience pain. So we look for someone who already possesses what we believe do not have.
We attach to that person because being close to them allows us to feel richer, more attractive, more important, or more secure. We call it “love.” We call it “fate.” We call it “soulmates.”
In reality, we are looking for a shortcut.
We want the benefits without the process. We want access to the outcome without the stuggles. The person we choose is often doing the exact same thing. They are also carrying their own lack. They are also searching for someone who can provide what they do not have.
This is not love. It is an extraction loop. It is two people using each other to escape their own sense of inadequacy, or combining their assets to create more power together.
The accurate word for this type of partnership is:
Alliance.
You heard that correctly. Remove the poetry. Strip away the romantic language. What remains is an alliance. An alliance is a strategic arrangement. It is an agreement between two parties to exchange resources, status, access, security, validation, or utility for mutual benefit.
It is not love. in no shape or form.
You do not enter an alliance because you are devoted to the well-being of the other person. You enter it because they provide something you need. There is no sentimentality in an alliance.
If the value disappears, the alliance weakens. If the utility disappears, the alliance ends. If the person can no longer provide what made the arrangement attractive in the first place, the relationship becomes difficult.
The alliance is sustained only as long as the exchange remains beneficial. Love is simply the word used to make the transaction sound beautiful. But underneath the language, the mechanics remain the same: calculated, purposeful, and transactional.
The Only True Definition of Love
“Romantic love” is not merely a failed transaction or a market-driven illusion. It is a fiction. It has never existed in the way people imagine it. It is a story humanity has been telling itself for generations. Love, if it exists in its purest form, is selfless. It exists without personal gain.
No validation.
No status.
No money.
No social advancement.
No borrowed importance.
No hidden benefit.
Nothing.
When every transaction is removed, what remains? Ask yourself which relationships are truly built on selfless love with no expectation of return.
Very few.
Love may exist, but when it does, it is usually found outside the romantic framework.
It can exist between parents and children.
It can exist between lifelong friends.
It can exist in rare moments of genuine selflessness where nothing is being taken and nothing is being traded.
But romantic love as it has been sold to you does not exist.
Romantic love as the completion of your soul does not exist.
Romantic love as the missing piece that will finally make you whole does not exist.
Romantic love as the foundation of your identity does not exist.
What exists is desire.
What exists is attraction.
What exists is attachment.
What exists is utility.
What exists is mutual exchange.
But the version of romantic love society, culture, and industry have taught you to pursue is a fiction. And the moment you see it, you cannot unsee it.