Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11.

(For my friend Vilma, aka The Contrary Mary)

Love, once a mystery, now shuffles through metaphorical fluorescent aisles. It has a number, a barcode, a discount code if you know where to look.

The digital dating marketplace offers faces in glass and names without weight. Swipe left, swipe right, spin the wheel again. We do not pursue, we browse. We do not court, we negotiate. We coordinate calendars and calculate risk. We optimize for results in traction, replies, conversions. Even our heartbreaks come pre-scheduled.

What I feel isn’t bitterness exactly, at least, not in the way cynics claim it. It is exhaustion, a fatigue not of the body, but of the soul. A weariness that comes from contorting yourself into an profile, selling fractions of yourself to people who wouldn’t recognize you whole.

I’ve tried to play this twisted game too many times. I’ve misread glances, I’ve gone for the kiss too soon, too bold, too wrong. I’ve waited for messages that never came, hoping my restraint would somehow count as virtue. I’ve said “no worries” when it did. But there is always worry, always the quiet sting of hope punished.

We are told there is abundance, that everyone’s on dating apps and on social media, that love is just another algorithm problem, just a matter of better inputs. But what we call abundance is glut. What we call freedom is disarray.

And so the great, silent tragedy of our time is not that people are unloved, but that they are unseen, mistaken for inventory, or worse, for threats in a society long lost to the madness of numbers and fanaticism.

Dating has become the unholy child of the bazaar, the battlefield, and the psychiatric ward. One moment you’re a product. The next, a veteran and a patient diagnosing your own malaise via meme. “What’s your attachment style? Are you the avoidant? The anxious? The secure?” No one’s secure anymore, we just pretend better, we lie more beautifully, we’ve grown fluent in euphemism.

We ghost out of self-care. We breadcrumb to keep the door ajar. We “circle back.” We “touch base.” We perform like interns trying to impress a senior partner. And in all this theatre, all this paperwork of desire, no one dares to say the obvious: that we’re all so terribly, profoundly lonely.

There is a grief in being treated as replaceable. But worse still is the shame of realizing you’re guilty of having done it to others: I’ve entertained the wrong people just to fill the silence. I’ve gone out with people I have not been the least attracted to out of boredom, and they definitely deserved better than the version of me that showed up. And still, I’ve found myself resenting them for making it too easy, for letting me get away with it.

This “dating economy” rewards psychopaths: those least burdened by conscience, emotionally agile, spiritually evacuated, the ones who can simulate intimacy without trembling. They do well here, but the rest of us carry bruises where no one can see. We pretend to be players, when really, we’re just bleeding actors in a collapsing play.

What I want cannot be packaged. It cannot be scheduled three weeks in advance. It cannot be arrived at through measurable metrics or synched-up Google Calendars. What I want begins with silence. With the stillness that follows recognition. That pause when someone sees us, not the role, not the stats, not the fake flirtation masking low self esteem, but us, in all our fractal complexity.

This is why I’ve stopped dating until things get better, if they ever do. Because I fear what I might become if I continue. I fear I will start to believe that love is just another strategy, or worse, I fear I will stop believing in it at all.

And yet, I still try to believe. Not in what they’ve made of it, but in what it once was, in what it still could be. I believe there is someone, somewhere, who has also stopped playing, walking through the world whole, not in pieces. Not misleading others in thinking there’s a chance, not performing the role of partner for a random someone until a better offer arrives. Because even if we optimize ourselves to be this better offer, we can, and most possibly will be outmatched by someone with less ethical concerns.

If I get to meet this ideal, it will not be because the system worked. It will be because grace found a crack in it. And when it does, I hope I will know, not because of a spark, nor chemistry or compatibility, but because, for the first time in a long time, there will be no transaction, no games, no ironic diagnosis. Only presence, recognition, the quiet, terrifying freedom of being actually seen.