I’ve been talking a lot about scams lately - the online ones where lonely men get catfished by “perfect” women. But let’s be honest: those scams are small potatoes compared to the biggest scam of all time.
Romantic love.
Not love itself - love is real, messy, unconditional, and powerful. The scam is the story we’ve swallowed about what love should look like.
Let’s rewind.
Before Romanticism (18th–19th century), people didn’t marry for love. They married for land, survival, money, or alliances. Marriage was a contract, not a fairy tale.
Sex? Everywhere, as always. People had lovers, mistresses, flings… because nobody expected marriage to be passion 🙄.
Then the poets and novelists (or perhaps a perfect perpetrated plan) showed up with lace handkerchiefs and tragic hearts. They sold us Romanticism: the idea that love was soul-merging devotion ending in marriage and with fireworks (or just submission) until death.
They told us love, sex, and marriage could all be rolled into one shiny package 😆.
And the collective unconscious said, “Cool idea, let’s do it.” (poor souls!)
Fast forward to today.
Marriages collapsing.
Couples living like roommates.
Tinder = an endless scroll of broken illusions.
People lost and lonely chasing “the love of their life” as if that was the solution to their misery.
Romanticism promised forever passion under the same roof with the same person until death. And the truth? It doesn’t work.
Romantic love is temporary madness. And yes, it’s real - that rush when your panties get wet just thinking about your new lover. (Note the keyword: new.) That anticipation is gold.
But as with anything temporary, it passes. Every. Single. Time. Once the spark fades and your partner’s quirks show up, life goes back to the ordinary.
So let’s be precise: long-term romantic love is fiction. A dopamine rush. A cultural hallucination.
So what’s left?
Do we give up on love? Hell no. We redefine it 😃
Real love isn’t soulmate flames, cosmic contracts, or pinky swears until death.
Real love is this:
Unconditional: I see you in your brilliance and in your mess, you’re an idiot sometimes… but I still love you.
Choice: I stay not because I’m trapped, but because I want to and I choose to take the whole package.
Partnership: We build something together - kids maybe, a dream, a project, a life worth remembering. Something.
That’s love. Not obsession. Not projection. Not someone being your “other half.” You are whole already. They are whole already. Love is two whole people choosing to walk together at the same path - no cages, no chains. Total awareness.
From my Aquarian bones, I’ll say it straight: Romanticism is over.
It’s time for unconventional love.
Love that allows freedom instead of ownership.
Love that values friendship above it all, respect, and growth more than illusion.
Love that doesn’t ask you to die for someone - but to live fully with someone.
We don’t need more fairy tales. We need love as freedom. Love as conscious choice.
Not a prison. Not a con. A revolution.
But wait, what about unconditional love and freedom?
“Unconditional love means putting up with anything, right?”
“Freedom means open marriage, sleeping with whoever?”
Errr… no.
Unconditional doesn’t mean being a doormat. It doesn’t mean tolerating abuse, dysfunction, or hamster-wheel partners who refuse to grow. Yes, you can love them - and must if you’re truly conscious - but love them from a distance. Healthy love has boundaries.
Freedom doesn’t mean chaos. It means no ownership. It means releasing the “my, my, my” syndrome: my man, my woman, my possession. Without freedom, it isn’t love. It’s control dressed up as commitment.
And here’s the root problem:
We show up to the dating scene with broken souls we don’t even know are broken. We’ve been too busy surviving, too scared to change. At first, falling in love hides the cracks. It feels like the holy grail. But sooner or later, reality slaps us and the wounds reappear: anxiety, depression, emptiness.
Because it was never love. It was projection. Illusion. A scam.
The revolution is this:
Love is unconditional, but not blind or stupid.
Love is choice, not magic in chains.
Love is partnership, not ownership.
Romanticism is dead. Good riddance.
What we need now is unconventional love and I won’t shut up about it.
Unconditional is in my genes. Bear in mind that I am a naked model of sorts who is also a philosopher, an astrology freak and also sings. I mean, if that is not unconventional, I don’t know what is💁♀️
Happy Sunday.
With unconditional love and freedom…
Rose 🌹
Watch me sing the song that was (secretly) written for me at this point in time 😆