The Capital of Love

They say that love is not about the money; it is supposed to be free. But it’s hard to speak the language of love when your pockets are empty.

Love was never supposed to have a price tag. Yet in reality, it often does. Dates, gifts, online expectations, and bills go on. Money quietly threads its way into modern romance. Even simple questions of “Who pays for the first date?” “Should it be 50/50?” “Should it be covered by the one who asked?” carries more than financial weight. They become tests of fairness, generosity, investment, and dynamics.

These days, a dinner bill is rarely just a dinner bill. It becomes a referendum on values: Who is investing more? Who wants this more? Who is risking more? Who owes what? Suddenly, a glossy piece of paper at the end of a meal becomes a symbol of commitment. 

For generations, expectations within a relationship, such as support, emotional safety and believing in one another, were deemed priceless—but now that’s just what they are, priceless. Rarely itemized, acknowledged and seldom reimbursed. It can go on for years without accounting, but the moment it becomes monetary— a modest 200 peso dinner, a ride home, it becomes measured. Too demanding, too dependent, too much.

What once were gestures of generosity are now negotiations. Small acts such as covering a meal, paying for a ride home, and treating someone without keeping score have become symbolic tests of fairness and worth. In these moments, love is no longer simply felt; it is calculated.

It is possible to love endlessly, but somehow still feel limited when the wallet is empty.

When Capitalism Rewrites

Love has always involved exchange. That’s not cynical; that’s human. Even at its most sincere, love requires the giving of time, care, effort, sacrifice, and emotional labour, often with the quiet hope that it will be met in return. 

What once made this exchange feel meaningful rather than draining was trust. Trust in continuity, in shared futures, and in social conditions that made vulnerability survivable. Within that trust, love felt fulfilling. Alive. Worth it.

But under capitalism, love becomes something that must justify itself. It is no longer simply felt; it is evaluated. Capitalism and consumer culture have transformed intimacy into a marketplace, where partners are assessed like products and emotions are measured through outputs: attention given, time invested, aesthetics, and public validation. We no longer fall in love—we just audit it.

Yearning has no ROI

Affection is expected to move somewhere and become something. Because in this dating era, no one wants a romance that remains stuck in the talking stage. This leaves little room for yearning. A kind of love that lingers without guarantees, without milestones, without promised outcomes.

In a culture obsessed with forward motion, yearning becomes an emotion without a sanctioned place.

And this shift is devastating for yearning.

Yearning is inefficient.

Yearning cannot be optimised.

Yearning produces no guaranteed return on investment. It asks for emotional expenditure without certainty of payoff, and in a system that rewards efficiency, predictability, and self-preservation, that kind of openness is framed as irresponsible.

So instead of pining, we hedge.

Instead of devotion, we match energy.

Instead of surrender, we maintain optionality.

Vulnerability as incompetence

To want openly is to admit desire for something you cannot fully control, something modern culture subtly teaches us to avoid. As a result, yearning becomes pathologised. It is labelled embarrassing, excessive, needy, even “begging.” Wanting too much is treated as a personal failure rather than a natural emotional state. It’s not that people don’t want love. It’s that the cost of love and emotional failure has risen.

Heartbreak today isn’t just painful; it’s disruptive. It threatens productivity, routine, self-branding, and mental stability. It interferes with work, focus, and output. And capitalism does not reward interruption. How love once interrupted life and gave it meaning, now punishes interruption. We are taught to optimise everything: careers, bodies, social presence, dating lives, etc. Even intimacy becomes something to manage rather than surrender to.

Real love demands the opposite of what capitalism cultivates. It is inefficient. It is communal. It is time-consuming. It requires an emotional surplus of time, energy and inner space that isn’t already consumed by survival. And most people simply don’t have that anymore. Exhaustion kills romance. Not just romantic relationships, but the romantic worldview itself; the belief in wonder, beauty, devotion, and emotional risk.

What we lost

We are so busy being clogs in the machine that love feels like an unwise risk.

This tragedy is not only that we lack time for love, but that capitalism has replaced love with productivity as a way of being. Worth is measured in output, not intimacy. And yet we still crave connection; it’s evident in the loneliness epidemic, the late-night scrolling, the fixation on “soft life,” and the quiet desperation for rest in a system that rarely allows it. In this landscape, yearning feels indulgent.

Something reserved for people with time, money, privacy, and emotional margin. But yearning has always thrived in excess in leisure, in emotional abundance, in moments where people weren’t constantly calculating risk.

Love might be in between us, but capitalism is in between us and love.

Capitalism didn’t eliminate desire; it made longing feel irresponsible.

And in doing so, it taught us to treat intimacy as excess and love as a risk we can’t afford.

But, in a world that quantifies everything: time, value, worth—love remains stubbornly immeasurable. It cannot be optimized without losing its meaning. It cannot be efficient without becoming hollow. And perhaps that is precisely why it matters.

Yearning persists not because it is practical, but because it is human. It asks for time without payoff, attention without metrics, devotion without guarantees.

So in a world that rewards productivity and punishes every pause, love becomes a quiet refusal. Not an escape from the system, but an act of resistance.

And the question is no longer whether love is practical.

It is whether a life that makes love feel irresponsible is one worth complying with.

Because if love requires rebellion to exist,

Then maybe loving, above all, is the rebellion.