Love is a fictional construct. The illusive masses convince themselves they love all the while riddled with hypocritical judgements for those same they love. It’s easy to witness the same theist claim they love all of gods creations equally while against their own belief judging and damning those who behave differently to a life of punishment because of those very differences.

Love is a plate of bullshit you feed the girl you want to fuck or the guy who has enough money to want to marry. It’s the drive that pushes you to have children if it means free government funds and food. Love is the backhand you introduce your partner of “eternity”. Love is raping your niece when they’re too young and telling them to tell no one because she doesn’t love you if she does. Love is giving up your pet of ten years because they create too much waste and you don’t want to feel guilty about buying a hummer, so you reduce your carbon footprint on one end to increase it in the other. Love is a baby in the trash because the parent was more worried about what someone else might think of them not wanting the child instead of the child’s life. Love is going behind your wife of twenty years to fuck someone who’s been around only as long as you’ve been married. Love is driving away after a car accident because jail is too daunting to want to stick around.

Out of all the kinds of love imaginable, the only forms of true love I find are introduced through selflessness. Not a parent’s fear of imprisonment or fear of losing their chore handler. Not a boyfriend buying expensive jewels to make up for his infidelity.

True selflessness, therefore, true love, comes at a greater cost. A person willing to pull the plug at a hospital on a suffering sibling. Allowing the peace of painlessness to take over regardless of the hurt that comes with knowing this person is no longer around. True selflessness is a person who knows they are poison and decides to remove themselves for the sake of the other person’s happiness. Love is a person knowing their partner is unhappy with them, and they remove themselves so they may drop irrational loyalty and move on to find the same joy in their life which you get from their existence.

Love is a parent who sets their ignorant preconceptions aside and attempts to understand their child rather than be a dictator. Love is the parent that understands every generation is better than the one before and gives in to the confusion that comes with knowing less as time goes by, but trusting their children and they move forward.

Love is wanting to understand enough to give up foolish pride and stand listening in order to better comprehend what is being taught.

Love is the parent that takes the bullet in exchange for their child’s life continuing.

Love is the person that gives up their life funds to assure another’s happiness.

Love is the dedication it takes to willingly want to understand your brothers and sisters. Whether their skin color is the same or different, whether their religious beliefs are similar or aren’t. Whether their opinions are odd, whether they’re clothes aren’t up to date or way ahead of their times, whether their music is too loud, or their culture too strange, or their family too chaotic. Love is understanding. It’s the want to connect. Love is the force that keeps people together for the sake of happiness.

In other words, love doesn’t exist.

We’re all selfish, we’re all ignorant. We are all always wondering what is the world thinking of us and what can we do to better our standing in the world, so they may like us, so they may love of. Simply with how we live, we do not love.

Love is an illusion. One we’ve elaborately designed to delude ourselves its real.

By Seth McAllister