The Binary We Inherit

There's a framework many of us absorb without questioning: physical intimacy without commitment is spiritually empty, while "real" love only exists in long-term relationships. One-night stands happen in a moral vacuum; love requires permanence to be legitimate.

When we accept that love must be measured by duration, we've already conceded something deeper: that time is the primary metric of value. That accumulation equals depth. That the eternal is more real than the ephemeral.

This is a particularly modern anxiety, I think. We're obsessed with optimization, with building portfolios. 

Career portfolios, investment portfolios, relationship portfolios, anything that demonstrates consistent long-term returns. We've imported the logic of compound interest into intimacy. As if love accrues value the same way retirement accounts do, as if presence in a moment without future equity is somehow a loss.

What gets lost is the entire realm of encounters that exist outside this temporal economy. Moments that don't build toward anything, that don't compound, that simply are

complete and whole in themselves.

We've created a system where staying in a relationship drained of love is more socially acceptable than showing up fully present for an encounter both people know will end.

Where maintaining the structure after the aliveness has left is seen as honorable, while acknowledging that the universe is pulling you in different directions is seen as flighty or immature. We'll celebrate someone who stays in a dead relationship out of commitment to the form, while quietly judging two people who choose to love each other completely for the season they have, then release each other with grace when that season ends.

Which is the greater affront to love? Treating it as a legal obligation that persists after the feeling has died, or honoring it by being fully present for however long presence is actually possible?

Two Different Experiences

I've learned to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of encounters. There are people who treat connection as something to be consumed—an experience for their own narrative, a way to feel something without offering anything in return. These encounters do leave you hollow. When someone is using you to fill their void and pump their ego, when they take without giving, when there's no real seeing or being seen.

The pornification of intimacy hasn't helped anyone—it's taught a generation of men to show up expecting much and giving very little, to perform for filling one's ego rather than meeting another person. To treat connection as just another form of consumption. And to never let down one’s walls.

Even when having sex, we’re still building walls. 

To be clear, women also perpetrate this dynamic. But call me a mysandrist, I've had a lot fewer women do that than men.

But there are also people who co-create. People whose presence is so complete that the arbitrary markers of time become irrelevant. One night or one thousand nights. What matters is the quality of attention, the reciprocity, the mutual recognition that this moment, these bodies, this exchange matters.

I've been incredibly lucky to have built a world full of these people. They show up in a particular way in life, so it has gotten easier to spot and filter for them. I recommend having more of these people in your life. Whether or not you sleep with them, they always leave a positive trace in your life.

The difference isn't about duration. It's about presence. About willingness to let go of scripts, about joy, play, seeing each other, recognizing the humanness in each other. In the end, it is about living. 

Why We Build Walls

I can only speak from the experience of a woman here, and I understand anyone who decides to filter out those looking for a more impermanent connection.

Traditional filters: courtship, waiting, making people prove themselves through time and ritual, they serve their purpose. When you've experienced the hollowness of being used, requiring someone to invest months before they can access deeper parts of you becomes a reasonable protection mechanism. Time can filter for people who are capable of sustained attention and care.

And sometimes this is necessary. Sometimes this is wise.

But we also lose when we make this the only acceptable path to intimacy. This filter, protective as it is, also cuts us off from recognizing love in forms that don't arrive through conventional channels.

Love Without a Forever Guarantee

There is love in the meal I cook for a friend at 2 a.m. when they need comfort. There is love in "text me when you get home" whispered as I leave the rave at dawn. There is love in the way light falls on water, in the sharp clarity of cold air on an early morning when you're driving someone you care about to where they need to be.

We cling to the idea that love must be eternal to be real, but impermanence doesn't negate value; it's simply the nature of all things. The cherry blossom is no less beautiful because it falls.

I'm not suggesting all temporary experiences hold equal value. Encounters where people show up to consume instead of create, where there's performance but no presence, where one party is used (and not in the consensual kinky way) are empty.

But what if we allowed for more nuance? What if love, like water, takes the shape of whatever container holds it, and is no less itself for being in a glass rather than an ocean?

Reconsidering Temporariness

The original claim was that bodies are temporary but love is forever. There's an irony here worth sitting with: precisely because our bodies are temporary, every form of love is also, in some sense, temporary. Or rather, love exists outside the framework of linear time entirely.

It's not that some love is temporary and some is eternal. It's that all love exists completely in each moment it occurs, and each moment is both infinite and already gone.

The connection I felt with someone whose story I'll never know fully, that existed in its entirety within the time we shared. It exists now as memory, and both states are complete unto themselves. The love doesn't become more or less real based on whether it extended into days, years, or lifetimes.

This isn't about devaluing committed love or long-term partnership. Those forms of love have their own depth, their own challenges, and revelations. But they aren't the only valid containers for love to exist within.

So, Will There Be Love?

Love isn't transactional in the way were it it is only granted to those who follow the one path. This isn't the Calvic Church; you've already been forgiven for your sins.

Love is more like sunlight: available to everything, not distributed based on merit or respectability. The question isn't whether love exists for those of us who refuse to perform sexual scarcity. Love already exists, in countless forms, in places we're told not to look for it.

The shape love takes matters less than how we show up for it. Co-creation versus consumption. Presence versus performance. Seeing versus using. These distinctions matter far more than whether something lasts one night or fifty years.

Bodies are temporary. Everything is temporary. And within that impermanence, there is so much love available — if we're willing to recognize it when it arrives in unexpected forms, dressed in clothes we were taught to despise.

I'm choosing to see it. All of it. Not because I'm naive about the ways people can hurt each other, but because I've realized that guarding against pain by limiting where I allow myself to recognize love only ensures I'll miss it when it shows up in forms least expected

The weed breaks through concrete. It shows up in places we deem unfitting for its 'correct' environment. Maybe that's what love does, too. Show up in the least fitting places, and bloom wherever it sees fit.

Acknowledgment.

I should acknowledge: I may have wandered far from what the original comment intended. Perhaps they meant "love" simply as the feeling itself—that ineffable warmth that can exist anywhere—and "hoes" as the empty consumption we all perform sometimes, regardless of relationship status or duration. Perhaps they were making a simpler point about presence versus absence, and I've constructed an elaborate architecture around an offhand remark.

We do this in conversation constantly, don't we? Fill in the gaps, make assumptions about meaning, build entire frameworks from fragments. But I've enjoyed this thought experiment, this following of the thread to see where it leads.

I like these roads and where they lead me.