I am sitting here in the humid, exhaust-choked corner of Da Nang, staring at a bottle of Saigon beer that I am ninety-nine percent sure was filled from a rusty tap in the back alley and recapped with a pair of pliers. It tastes like suspect decisions, but it goes down cheap, and right now, cheap is the only honest thing in the room. You slid this little piece of internet poetry across the table to me—this sugar-spun manifesto about what love is and isn’t—and asked me to put it under the bare fluorescent light of reality.
So let’s strip the paint off this thing and see the rust underneath.
You read these lines floating around the internet: Dating is not love. Talking to someone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week is not love. Staying up all night for someone is not love. Those things can feel intense, exciting, even addictive, but they are not love. They got one thing right: it isn’t love. It’s adrenaline. It’s the manic, sweaty panic of a high-stakes negotiation. When you’re up all night texting some woman, you aren’t building a soul connection; you’re micromanaging a volatile asset. You’re making sure the competition hasn’t outbid you while you were sleeping. It’s intoxicating, sure, the same way stepping onto a casino floor with your mortgage money in your pocket is intoxicating. You’re high on the anxiety of the hunt and the fear of the loss. But the poetry always stops before the hangover.
Then the script tries to pivot into philosophy: Love is not a feeling, not an action or set of circumstances. Love is a choice. Damn right it’s a choice. It’s an economic choice. It’s a ruthless, calculated decision made at the intersection of supply, demand, and sheer exhaustion. You look around the marketplace—whether that’s a divorce-ravaged American suburb or a scooter-infested street in Southeast Asia—and you choose the liability you can afford to finance. She looks at you, does the mental arithmetic of your earning potential versus how much of your snoring she can tolerate, and she makes a choice to sign the lease. You’re choosing the 50-year-old size 2 with the dolphin forehead who treats you like a king, and she’s choosing the six-foot-four white guy who doesn’t blink when the dinner bill arrives. It’s a choice, but let’s not pretend it’s ordained by the stars. It’s ordained by the currency exchange rate.
And here is where the fairy tale really starts shoveling the dirt: Love is someone seeing you at your absolute worst and still loving you the same. It’s someone stepping up and making things happen for you when you can’t. It’s someone holding you close and calming you down while you’re crying your heart out.
Let me pour a little of this watered-down truth on that fire. If a woman is seeing you at your “absolute worst” and sticking around, it’s not because her heart is pure; it’s because her alternatives are worse. If she is stepping up when you fall down, it’s because she’s terrified the gravy train is derailing and she needs to grab the steering wheel before you crash her meal ticket into a ditch.
And as for “crying your heart out”? The day a man drops his guard and cries his heart out in the arms of a woman is the day she starts updating her dating profile. Men aren’t allowed an “absolute worst.” The moment you stop being the authoritarian, the moment you stop being the pillar that holds the roof up, you stop being a commodity of value. You become a burden. She might pat your head in the moment, but the market price of your masculinity just plummeted, and she is already calculating the cost of a bailout.
But the poetry keeps humming its little tune: It’s someone reminding you of all the good in you, when all you can see are your flaws. Love is someone praying for you, supporting you in silence, and understanding you even when you don’t say a word.
Flattery is the WD-40 they spray on the hinges of your wallet. When she reminds you of the “good in you,” she’s reminding you why you should keep paying the rent. And that silent support? That “understanding without words”? That is the quiet hum of a predator plotting her next move. She doesn’t need you to speak because she already read the bank statements. She’s “praying” for you alright—praying that your cholesterol holds steady long enough for the life insurance policy to vest.
And the grand finale, the absolute masterpiece of the con: It’s someone who stays faithful behind your back, who cuts off anything or anyone that makes you uncomfortable. That’s real love. And if you ever find it? Don’t let it go, honor it, hold onto it forever.
Faithful behind your back just means the higher bidder hasn’t walked into the bar yet. Cutting off the competition isn’t an act of devotion; it’s a monopoly tactic. She’s securing her territory, isolating the host so no other parasite can feed on the same vein.
We are all fundamentally driven by survival, greed, and the terrifying fear of dying alone in a room that smells like stale urine. Society slaps the word “love” over the transaction to make it palatable, the same way the bartender slaps a clean label over this dirty, recycled bottle of beer to make me think I’m drinking top-shelf. We are conditioned by churches and movies to believe in this unconditional safety net, but it’s a ghost.
If you ever “find” what this poem describes, don’t hold onto it forever. Check your pockets, verify the deed to your house, and enjoy the performance for what it is—a fleeting, highly produced magic trick. You rent the illusion, you enjoy the show, you take the footage, but you never, ever believe that the rabbit actually disappeared.
Finish your beer. The scooters are still dodging death outside, completely oblivious to the traffic lights, just like we are. It’s all controlled chaos, my friend. Don’t look for meaning in the madness; just make sure you aren’t the one walking away with the tab when the music stops.
