Love Is Dead and We Killed Her

But we can also Frankenstein her back to life

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I. From death

In his 1882 book The Gay Science, everyone’s favorite grumpy uncle Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the famous passage,

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?

All philosophers have their interpretation of the paragraph, but the general shape of this idea is that scientific advances during the Enlightenment put serious dents in the god hypothesis. This, Nietzsche thought, also removed the divine justification for Christian morality, which revealed itself as a frail and crumbling edifice. ‘God says so’, was no longer a solid foundation for moral rules.

We can say the same about modern love — we have taken our knives to her.

In her recent essay ‘Love Is Worth Believing In’, which inspired me to write this post, Freya India identifies a combination of factors that led to the disillusion with modern love: social media, dating apps, depictions in mainstream media, our (somewhat paradoxical) undervaluing of romantic love, and the checklist mentality of ticking ‘perfect partner’ boxes.

An analysis as sharp as a dagger. Speaking of daggers; according to most sources, Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times by a group of senators¹. It’s impossible to know who delivered the lethal blow, if anyone — the Roman historian Seutonius reported that Caesar died due to blood loss.

Like Caesar and Nietzsche’s god, love didn’t die because of a single blow. She bled out.

II. Through hell

A fallen god, an assassinated dictator, and now, love leaves us too.

Loneliness consumes us and friendships recede in the rearview mirror. Never have more people felt the need to pursue ‘side hustles’ to make ends meet. Around a third of adult Americans are single, and only 35% of those single Americans say that they are even looking for a committed romantic relationship.

We are collectively retreating from the (physical) world.

For all the benefits of a hyper-connected global village, it has a downside too: crises get entangled. I am wary of calling this (or any) moment a ‘uniquely impactful’ point in human history, but we are facing ecological, economic, and political crises that spread their tangled tentacles across the world. Perhaps so much so that the term ‘polycrisis’ is warranted.

The modern disillusion about love is not just about social media, of course, but the virtual places we seek refuge in bombard us with a feed of curated and perfectly filtered faces and lives we can never hope to achieve. It’s fake. We know it’s fake. Still, we can’t help but compare ourselves to those impossible standards and find ourselves lacking. Those same places tell us all men are assholes and all women have unrealistic standards. This too we know is fake. But if we hear it enough, we might start to wonder whether there's not a kernel of truth in there. It’s called the availability bias; we use the most readily available information to shape our worldview.

Something even more insidious is going on. We have a negativity bias too. Negative news makes us click and engage. Social media combines the availability and negativity biases, and, in love and elsewhere, I think we should collectively be more aware of this. Negative, controversial topics get more engagement, proprietary algorithms pick them up and push them, and so, most of what we see is negatively skewed. Consume enough of it, and we’ll start believing it.

“True love is a gentle but persistent whisper,” gets fewer clicks and comments than “I went on 100 Tinder dates and all the guys/girls are jerks.” Take a wild guess which one of those two is more likely to go viral and litter our personal feeds, occupy magazine space, and spark reply pieces. Hint: it’s not the first one.

Society at large is trying to deal with several rapid changes, but no one truly knows how to deal with them. That’s scary. Because of the demands of daily life and the seemingly general time and energy deficit on an individual level, we scroll our phones and tap our screens in search of a moment of peace. Instead of bringing us peace, this constantly reminds us of how inadequate we are compared to the fake, filtered gods we’ve come to worship, not to mention their acolytes who sell lies to farm the fruits of our attention. Lies like ‘real love doesn’t exist’.

Any woman simply has to browse her DMs to find a ‘better’ guy and guys don’t want to commit, we hear. We read about broken and abusive relationships, listen to podcasts about famous men being predators, get sucked into the delusional manosphere and its mate value nonsense, and watch TikToks by women who tell us they only want to date tall, dark, and handsome (oh, and rich).

No wonder we’re checking out.

Well, that’s gloomy.

*cracks knuckles*

Time for my mad scientist routine.

III. To be reborn

Literary powerhouse Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is most famous for her novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus². When the monster asks its creator for a partner, it says:

You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.

This is interesting. Frankenstein’s monster does not resign to the impossibility of love. Why not, it wonders, create love?

Notwithstanding the entitlement in the monster’s demand³, it seems that love is greater than our curmudgeon’s dead god. Nietzsche claimed that a dead god must remain dead, but love doesn’t have to. She is more powerful than any god and we have the power to bring her back.

We can choose to divert some of our attention to positive stories. That doesn’t mean we need to be blind to reality or accept people who treat us like crap. There are (far too many) abusive people out there, there are relationships that really don’t work, and it’s a sad truth that women are (on average) still more likely to draw the short straw in straight relationships. But we can choose to share the relationship straws, which is the whole bloody point.

We can choose not to let social media and society dictate who we should or shouldn’t fall for. Why not go for someone who makes you feel good and seen and heard? Someone who is home and not merely arm candy? We can choose which personal qualities matter to us, regardless of what social media and society tell us. Go for your playful romance, your bookshop date⁴, or your quiet, gentle love! You can choose a shared coffee⁵ cuddled up on the sofa over a mind-numbingly boring luxury trip that will look nice on the ‘gram.

More than ever, for now at least⁶, many of us have the freedom to choose the shape of our preferred relationships, even though ‘influencers’ and society try to tell us we don’t.

Of course, this isn’t easy. It’s not easy running the risk of getting hurt; it’s not easy going against the preferences your friends or family (or followers?) expect you to have; it’s not easy getting rejected so much or so painfully that each time your heart beats you wonder why the blood doesn’t squirt through the cracks. It’s hard to learn that the power of physical attraction is rarely the best indicator for relationship success in a world that so eagerly rewards shallowness⁷. It’s hard, period.

But love isn’t dead.

She never was; we simply have to choose to see her.

If you - here she comes, freshly resurrected - loved this post, click all the hearts and buttons and things. Feel free to share it with anyone who needs to read it. All this helps me negotiate with our new deity called the algo(d)rithm.

With, obviously, love,

Gunnar

1. Crap. Did I just lean into the ‘guys think about the Roman Empire all the time’ stereotype? Not the case, I promise.

2. But she wrote so much more! (Not to mention all the editing she did for her husband, the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.)

3. Too many manosphere podcasts (or manosphere telegrams at that time), maybe.

4. Where do I apply?

5. Sharing my coffee!? That’s love for you.

6. *stares at global politics*

7. Which is not to say that physical attraction doesn’t matter. Of course, it does, more than we like to admit. But it’s only one component of a complex whole.