Romantic Love, Transactional Relationships, and True Love are Distinct Issues

The following are distinct issues, but are almost always confused for each other: (1) romantic love, (2) transactional relationships, and (3) true love.

Addressing and resolving this confusion could reduce an almost infinite amount of internal/subjective suffering such as in heartache, depression, anxiety, and despair…as well as negative external/societal impact such as infidelity, divorce, medication, murder, and suicide.

1. Romantic Love

This is selfish and what people usually think of as love, when you’re actually “love sick” and actually insane/psychotic with physical symptoms resembling drug addiction and suffer from severe stress, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, etc. It’s when you want someone so much that nothing else in life matters and you no longer can control yourself, as if you cannot even breathe without them.

It based on the idealization of the “other” and external reality as perceived and filtered by your own insanity (which is temporary, thankfully), so it’s a selfish process involving your own mind creating the thing that does not actually reflect reality that you want so bad. It is the central theme in movies, myths, novels, songs, poems, etc.

2. Transactional Relationship

This is the approximate parity of an exchange of different things of equal value such as sex, children, status, and security. This exchange is mediated through emotion.

It’s important to note that emotion and rationality are not opposites, since emotion is the game-theoretical and rational encapsulation of deep subconscious calculations that we evolved in our long evolutionary history. In other words, rather than run through an extensive analytical process of rewards and risks, you simply feel it, which is a far more efficient process.

Men and women are far more suitable to give and receive different items of exchange, and it can change as a function of time. Example:
- A young man has nothing and is transactionally worthless to both women and men since he has no valuable resources, but he can accumulate more agency and power as he gets older
- A young woman on the other hand, is an inexorable force since she can influence and outright control even the most powerful men through her explicit sexuality and implied fertility, bordering on mythological — think of the stories and archetypes of Helen of Troy, Aphrodite/Venus, Artemis/Diana, or Eve

3. True Love

This is selfless “giving” rather than “receiving”, up to and including giving “everything” and receiving “nothing” in complete selflessness.

Four examples of this:
- You love someone so much, you no longer require anything from them. It can persist regardless of the circumstances, such as if they are not in a relationship with you and you are happy they are happy.
- Unconditional love of a parent for their child where there is nothing the child can do to diminish the parent’s love, that arises unconditionally from the mere existence of the child
- A soldier in battle who willingly gives up their life so that his comrades may live
- Religious conception of Jesus dying due to love of humanity, without requiring anything in return

Unfortunately, many including myself, confuse these three distinct phenomena of romantic love, transactional relationships, and true love. They are not necessarily good or evil, superior or inferior, but just qualitatively different and each have their place. It’s only when they are confused for each other that there are very big problems personally and societally.

Ideally, romantic love is the initial phase that kicks off a process where everyone benefits from a transactional relationship that extends “till death do us part” as true love.