There was a time when love was the pulse of a relationship, the quiet, unspoken language between two people who simply chose each other. Not because it made financial sense, not because it looked good on paper, not because the mortgage was easier to split in two but because it felt right. Those days feel increasingly rare. Somewhere along the way, love was quietly replaced by practicality, status and the illusion of security.
Today, many relationships often look more like contracts than connections. People are pairing off based on lifestyle compatibility rather than emotional intimacy. Conversations about shared values have been replaced with questions like “Do you own or rent?” and “What’s your salary range?” It’s not that stability and ambition are wrong, far from it, but when they become the foundation of intimacy, something deeply human gets lost.
Many people now spend their lives beside someone who appears suitable on paper, yet leaves them emotionally starving. They have the houses, the cars, the annual holidays but no warmth when the lights go out. The relationship functions, it works, in a mechanical sense but it doesn’t live. And slowly, without realising it, partners forget what genuine love even feels like.
We’ve mistaken partnership for property ownership and affection for convenience. The idea of love has been distorted into a checklist: compatible goals, similar earning potential, matching aesthetics. Meanwhile, real connection, the kind that demands vulnerability, patience, and courage, feels too risky. People would rather build an empire with someone who appears suitable than risk breaking open with someone real.
Love is meant to wake us up, to expose, soften and grow us. It’s not something you acquire; it’s something you become in the presence of another person.
When love was killed, what replaced it was practicality. Relationships became projects to manage, rather than loving mysteries to explore. And in doing so, we’ve forgotten one of life’s most fundamental truths: all the wealth in the world can’t buy connection and the sense of being alive and present with another person.
Perhaps it’s time to revive love, not the romanticised version we see in films, but the raw, messy, heart-expanding kind that requires us to be seen. To stop asking “What can this person give me?” and start wondering “Can I truly meet this person where they are?”
Because love isn’t necessarily found in what you own together. It’s found in how you hold each other, in truth, in presence and in the willingness to grow side by side, not just build side by side.
When love was killed, we lost more than romance. We lost a part of our humanity. I wonder if we can bring it back.