💘 WTF Is Love Anyway? A Guide for Ugly Little Beasts With No Good Reason to Be Loved...

An excruciatingly long and extremely unreasonable exposĂ© on the absurd miracle of love, the doom of gym memberships, and why asking “Why do you love me?” is emotional terrorism.


By The Department of Emotional Damage & Enlightenment
Special to the International Absurdity Tribune


Let’s get one thing out of the way: you are unlovable. Yes, you. Don’t flinch, don’t blink, don’t even try to moisturize and correct that with a charming anecdote or a trip to therapy. You’re moody, inconsistent, passive-aggressive before coffee and psychotically idealistic after two drinks. Your Spotify Wrapped is embarrassing, and you definitely have at least one pair of socks older than your last meaningful conversation.

And yet—someone, somewhere, loves you. Not because you are lovable. But in spite of that glaring cosmic injustice. Welcome to the greatest WTF of them all: love.


PART I: Gains, Delusions & Other WTF Life Choices

THE ABSURDITY OF REASONS

In a world where you can’t even get a barista to remember your name correctly, someone has voluntarily pledged to deal with your digestive noises and indecisive Netflix scrolling until one of you dies. If that doesn’t strike you as profoundly irrational, then I regret to inform you: you may already be in love, and no one warned you.

We often ask—especially at emotionally vulnerable points like birthdays, anniversaries, and post-coital burrito runs—“Why do you love me?”

Let me tell you something your therapist won’t: this is an emotional booby trap. It’s like handing someone a shovel, pointing to a minefield, and whispering, “Prove you can love me through this.”

When your partner says, “Because you’re kind,” you’ll remember every time you weaponized the silent treatment.
When they say, “Because you’re strong,” you’ll recall how you cried over a broken USB charger.
When they say, “Because you’re stable,” you’ll think of that time you impulsively bought a kayak and live in a one-bedroom apartment.

No answer will ever be sufficient, because love, unlike IKEA furniture, does not come with an instruction manual or a parts checklist. The moment you try to explain love, it becomes a PowerPoint presentation—and no one has ever felt butterflies while looking at a pie chart.

EMOTIONAL LANDMINES IN THE BEDROOM

Love is not a reward system. It's not a punch card: 10 good deeds gets you one cuddle session and a backrub. It’s not UberEats—you can’t track it in real-time and complain if it’s cold.

And yet, we persist in treating love as a resume. We date like we’re applying for tenure. “Please see attached: my job title, my trauma history, a filtered image of me holding a dog I met once in a park, and a playlist of songs that are meant to sound spontaneous but took me two hours to curate.”

We audit our lovers too. “He hasn’t texted back in four hours. Probation.”
“She used my toothbrush without asking. Verbal warning.”
“He said 'I love you' but didn’t look me in the eye. Detention.”

All this because we believe that love must be earned, measured, or—at the very least—justified. But love is not justice. If it were, most of us would be in solitary confinement with no visitation rights.

FALLING OUT OF LOVE (AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS)

Maybe love doesn’t end when it runs out of reasons. Maybe love ends like a TV show. It had a good run, the characters got tiresome, the plot lost steam, and the network execs (aka mutual resentment and financial stress) pulled the plug.

And you’re left watching reruns in your head, wondering what went wrong.

Here’s the twist: nothing went wrong. Love isn’t something you lose like a sock or a friend during a group trip to IKEA. It ends, sometimes, because it was meant to. It’s not your fault. Unless you said “It’s not you, it’s me,” in which case, you deserve to stub your toe every morning for a year.

But when love does last, and I mean really last—through missed birthdays, financial ruin, in-laws with opinions, terrible restaurant choices, and that godawful thing they said in 2019 that you’ll never forget—it’s not because of reasons. It’s because you made the unreasonable decision to stay.

LOVE, LIKE LAUGHTER, JUST HAPPENS

Imagine trying to explain a joke. “It’s funny because the monkey represents capitalism and the banana is a metaphor for late-stage consumerism.” No. Now it’s dead.

Love works the same way. If you try to dissect it, rationalize it, or surgically extract the why from the what, you’re left with something that vaguely resembles commitment but tastes like dry toast. No butter. Just crumbs.

Love—like dancing, like crying, like belly-laughing at 3am over something stupid—is something you feel first and only understand (poorly) much later. Or never.

Trying to justify love is like trying to reason with the wind. It doesn’t answer. It just moves you.

THE MIRACLE OF STAYING

It’s easy to fall in love. Any fool with a decent playlist and manageable childhood trauma can do it. The miracle is staying in love. Continuing to choose someone even after they’ve seen you at your worst, smelled your morning breath, and heard your sleep-fart symphonies.

Love is staying up late to finish their laundry because you know they have a big day tomorrow. It’s letting them tell the same boring story at a party for the eighth time, and still laughing. It’s seeing them cry at a commercial about dogs, again, and not making fun of them. At least not immediately.

Love is unreasonable. That’s the whole point.



PART II: Death, Drama & the Unexpected Romance of ICU Socks

Why You’re Unlovable, Why That’s Wonderful, and Why Love Is Basically an Existential Prank

Somewhere deep in the sweaty bowels of modern romance, between the self-help aisle of your local bookstore and the endless loop of romcoms where quirky girls fall for emotionally unavailable carpenters, lies a fundamental misunderstanding: that love is something reasonable.

Yes, apparently, a certain subsection of humanity believes love should be grounded in logic—like it’s a mortgage application or a protein smoothie recipe. “I love you because you’re kind, funny, hot, stable, emotionally mature, good with dogs, fluent in Italian, and you once bought me soup when I was sick.” Which is adorable, in the same way a toddler operating a forklift is adorable: heartwarming but fundamentally unsafe.

Let’s get this straight: there is no good reason to love anyone. And that is the only reason it works. If there were a reason, it would be susceptible to re-evaluation. “He’s so tall,” you say. But what happens when someone taller walks in? “She’s brilliant.” Until you realize she gets her medical advice from YouTube tarot readers. “They’re so caring.” Until they’re late picking you up and forget your gluten intolerance exists. Reasons are brittle things. Love survives only because it ignores them entirely.

THE GYM, THE TREADMILL, AND THE TRAUMA — A GENERAL OPINION PIECE ON LOVE

In today’s world, love is often mistaken for a checklist. Popular culture, self-help books, and the hyper-curated lives we see online have created a collective delusion: that love must be earned through achievements, aesthetics, and absurdly specific routines. People hit the gym like pilgrims on a sacred journey, sculpting their bodies into offerings to some invisible pantheon of worthiness. They pursue advanced degrees not always out of intellectual curiosity, but in hopes that being “interesting” will make them more desirable. Even their skincare choices are imbued with the quiet hope that clearer skin might equal clearer chances at being loved.

This transactional idea of love—the notion that it’s something one qualifies for if only they’re impressive enough—leads to a quiet kind of emotional exhaustion. It convinces people that if they just try harder, run farther, read deeper, earn more, or appear more composed, love will find them. It's a belief system that feeds off insecurity and rewards performative self-improvement over genuine connection.

But love, as life often demonstrates in the most inconvenient ways, doesn’t play by those rules.

Take, for instance, a not-so-hypothetical scenario: a man running on a treadmill, furiously chasing the mirage of desirability, collapses from cardiac arrest. This isn’t metaphorical heartbreak—it’s literal heart failure. He falls, flatlines, and the gym’s soundtrack continues unironically with a cheesy ‘80s power anthem. At that moment, everything he thought made him lovable—his fitness, his determination, his curated charm—ceased to matter.

And yet, he was revived. Not just by paramedics, but by the presence of someone who chose to stay through the mess that followed. A partner who didn't retreat in the face of vulnerability, but leaned in. Someone who didn't see leaking IVs, hospital gowns, and disoriented mumbling as the end of attraction, but as part of the unpredictable contract that real love demands.

This is the moment when the myth of conditional love unravels.

True love is rarely sexy in the conventional sense. It’s not found in flexed abs or witty banter. It’s found in moments of complete undoing—when a person is at their weakest, most unpolished, and perhaps even most unpleasant. It’s when someone sticks around not because you’re impressive, but because you’re human. Love, at its core, is not a response to greatness. It’s a spontaneous, often irrational commitment that arises in the spaces where greatness has nothing to do with it.

In this sense, love is less of a performance and more of a divine accident. It’s the willingness to hold someone’s hand not just at candlelit dinners, but in emergency rooms. It’s finding the person still beside you after you’ve vomited on their socks—emotionally or literally. It’s not a reward for being lovable, but a testament to the absurdity and grace of being loved anyway.

So maybe it’s time to retire the idea of love as a scoreboard, and instead accept it for what it really is: a wild, unreasonable decision made by people who, despite everything, continue to show up for each other.

Because in the end, the treadmill breaks, the skincare fades, and even the most carefully constructed personas collapse under pressure. But the love that remains—the kind that doesn’t ask why or how—that’s the kind worth surviving for.

Unlovable: And Other Fun Facts About You

Let’s be honest. You’re not lovable. Neither am I. Nobody is. We’re walking bundles of neuroses, deeply flawed creatures who sneeze on each other, smell weird in summer, and say “you too” when the waiter says “Enjoy your meal.” We age badly, make questionable life choices, and sometimes Google “how to fake your own death and start over.”

And yet—miracle of miracles—someone out there loves you. Or did. Or might. Why? Don’t ask. That’s like asking why raccoons wash their food or why toddlers have a vendetta against silence. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes. But it’s happening. Or it did. Or it will. That should terrify and delight you in equal measure.

The Myth of the Lovable Self

Modern society has convinced us that love is a commodity to be earned, like frequent flyer miles or retweets. We are all desperately trying to make ourselves “lovable.” We hit the gym, take improv classes, post thirst traps of our cappuccinos, and casually mention our therapy breakthroughs in social settings (“Yeah, I’ve really been working on my attachment style”).

But love doesn’t care about your abs, your degree, or your third-place trophy in a regional spelling bee. Love is like a raccoon in your garbage bin at 3am—it shows up uninvited, makes a mess, and refuses to explain itself.

Reasonable Love Is a Glorified Spreadsheet

The moment you start itemizing your partner’s good qualities like a list of ingredients on an overpriced jar of almond butter, you’re already halfway out the door. “I love them because they’re generous and cook well and get along with my mom” sounds great until you realize those things also describe your UberEats delivery guy.

The real thrill of love isn’t in its justifications. It’s in its audacity. You don’t love someone because they’re perfect. You love them despite the fact that they just sang the wrong lyrics to every single song on the radio for an entire road trip. You love them even though they collect Funko Pop figurines, believe horoscopes are scientific, and once tried to fix a leaky faucet with chewing gum and confidence.

Love Is a Panic Purchase During a Fire Sale

At some point, most of us stumble into love the way people accidentally sign up for a gym membership they can’t cancel: we don’t remember why we did it, we’re too embarrassed to admit we regret it, and we keep showing up out of habit, vaguely hoping something magical will happen.

And sometimes it does. That’s the absurdity of it. Two flawed, anxious, temperamental carbon-based lifeforms just... choose to like each other. For a little while. Or for a long while. No celestial contract. No ROI projections. No good explanation.

And when it doesn’t work? That’s fine too. Because the beauty of loving unreasonably is that it’s not a moral failing when it ends. The music stops. The raccoon leaves. The joke fades. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It means it was what it was: an unprovable, illogical, chaotic miracle you got to witness from the inside.

The Relationship Performance Olympics

Let’s talk about that moment, five or seven years into a relationship, when you find yourself eating lukewarm takeout next to someone you once wept for under a full moon. They say “I love you,” and what they really mean is “Please validate me, I’m still here, right?” You smile and say it back, and then both of you subtly wonder if it’s still true or if you're just reenacting a very familiar stage play called Our Love Is Fine Please Don't Look Too Closely at the Set.

This is what happens when we think of love as a job description. When we feel like we must constantly justify it to ourselves and others. But love is not a PowerPoint presentation. There is no pie chart, no bullet-pointed list, no budget proposal. The moment we try to break it down logically, it evaporates like a fart in a hurricane.

Marriage: A Long-Term Prank We Play on Ourselves

And marriage? Don’t even get me started. Marriage is the boldest commitment two people can make to keep being unreasonable—together—for the rest of their lives. It is a pact to love someone even as their skin changes texture, their breath changes tone, and their opinions on furniture placement become increasingly unhinged.

Marriage is looking at the same face every morning and saying, “Yeah, I guess I’m still in.” Not because of a checklist. But because why the hell not. Because they once brought you orange juice in bed. Because they laugh at your terrible puns. Because they exist, and somehow, you haven’t murdered each other yet.

Unconditional Love: Not What You Think It Is

We throw around terms like “unconditional love” as if we understand them. But let’s be real: most people mean “I’ll love you as long as you continue to meet my standards, which I will not share with you until you fail to meet them.” That’s not love. That’s emotional Costco.

True unconditional love is actually horrifying. It means loving someone when they are completely unlovable. It means staying even when there’s no return policy. It means looking into the face of someone who has disappointed you for the 57th time and thinking, “Yep. Still them. Still mine.”

That kind of love is not based on reason. It’s based on surrender. On cosmic foolishness. On the ability to say, “I have no idea why I’m still here, but I am.” And that’s its magic.

Falling Out of Love: When the Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

If love is unreasonable, how does it end? Not, as many people fear, because the reasons run out. It ends because we start demanding reasons. Because we forget that we weren’t here to begin with because of logic. We try to retrofit a sacred farce with a spreadsheet, and when it doesn’t balance, we bail.

Sometimes love ends like a sitcom: abruptly, awkwardly, with a half-hearted chuckle. Sometimes it ends like a symphony: swelling and beautiful, fading gently into the ether. Sometimes it ends like a goat rodeo: messy, chaotic, and full of screaming.

But always, it ends. And that’s not a tragedy. That’s just time. And time is the only real reason we ever needed in the first place.

So What Now?

You, dear reader, will never be truly lovable. And neither will anyone else. And that is the greatest cosmic gag of all: we are unworthy of love, and yet we love anyway.

So stop trying to deserve it. Stop asking why. Stop writing mental lists of your partner’s good qualities. They’re probably not as impressive as you think anyway.

Just laugh. Cry. Fart under the covers. Make bad decisions. Clean up the mess. And be deeply, ridiculously, wondrously loved for no reason at all.

Because that—more than beauty, more than compatibility, more than mutual Google calendars—is the only kind of love worth having:

The kind that makes absolutely no sense.


CLOSING THOUGHT: NO REASON REQUIRED

So next time someone asks, “Why do you love me?”
Say, “Because I do.”
And mean it.

Don’t list your partner’s attributes like a used car salesman. Don’t itemize your affections. Just let love be the one wild, unearned, inexplicable miracle in your otherwise overly documented existence.

And when the cynicism creeps in, when the gym calls, when your spreadsheets beg for reason—just remember:

We are all extremely unpleasant little beasts.
But we still love.
And are loved.

And that, my friend, is the most outrageous WTF of all.

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