The Autonomy Ideal

Modern liberal thought casts love as a contract between equals. We choose our partners, negotiate terms, and expect mutual benefit. The emphasis is on freedom—freedom from obligation, tradition, or coercion. In this framework, love is a rational act: the expression of values, preferences, and compatibility. It’s not that emotion is excluded, but that it is managed within a structure of personal agency.

This ideal is attractive. It promises equality, respect, and the dignity of choice. But it also imposes a burden: if love is fully voluntary, then we are responsible for its failure. If passion fades, the implication is not tragedy, but poor selection.

Moreover, the autonomy model struggles to explain the ways love often resists our intentions. We fall for people at the wrong time, of the wrong type, despite ourselves. We stay when it’s hard, not because we chose to, but because we somehow must. Love may be many things—but wholly rational, it is not.

The Irrational Core of Love

To love unconditionally is to love without calculation. It is to affirm another person even when they disappoint, change, or fall short. In this sense, love resembles a kind of faith—not blind, but persistent, irrational, enduring. Philosophers from Kierkegaard to Simone Weil have seen in love a form of surrender: a giving-over of the will.

This is where the tension with autonomy sharpens. How can we be free and devoted? How can we choose to love someone no matter what, and still claim that love as an act of will?

The answer may lie in a deeper conception of freedom—not as the absence of attachment, but as the deliberate entering into it. To love is not to lose oneself, but to reorient the self around another, freely. In this view, love is not irrational because it lacks reason, but because it transcends it. It is not anti-choice; it is a higher form of commitment—a binding of the will through the will.

Romance in the Age of the Curated Self

But what happens when love is mediated by algorithms, profile pictures, and a marketplace of options? In modern hookup culture, intimacy often begins with selection rather than spontaneity, branding rather than vulnerability. We present stylised versions of ourselves to elicit desired responses. Attraction becomes transactional: swipe for dopamine, match for validation.

This environment encourages a paradoxical detachment. The more control we gain over whom we engage with, the harder it becomes to let go of control once we connect. Intimacy demands exposure, risk, and emotional labour—qualities at odds with the swipe economy’s emphasis on ease and optimisation.

As a result, many report feeling fragmented—always looking, never finding; always connecting, never quite committing. Love becomes elusive not because we are free, but because we are too cautious to be truly bound.

The Paradox of Love as Freedom

In the end, love resists clean categories. It is both a surrender and a choice. It thrives on freedom, yet demands fidelity. It begins in desire, but matures into devotion. To love well is not to abandon autonomy, but to direct it toward something greater than the self.

Perhaps the most meaningful relationships are those where freedom is not erased, but redefined—where the choice to love is renewed even when it no longer feels easy, exciting, or entirely rational.

In an age of endless options and curated selves, the challenge is not to find love, but to remain open to the kind that unsettles, transforms, and binds. For in that vulnerability lies not weakness, but the deepest form of freedom.