​​Zero Sum Love

This is how love goes: First, you meet someone. You see them at a coffee shop, a little on the nose, but maybe the cliché is what makes you trust it. They have that smirk like they've read the last page of every book you haven't. You introduce yourself. You pretend it's fate. You tell yourself, "This is different." No one believes it, least of all you.

And then you fall in love. You trade secrets, body heat, toothpaste. You build inside jokes, speak your own language. Nights, you lie in bed, and they talk about childhood dreams, how they wanted to be an astronaut, a painter, a rock star. Something unattainable. You know, something they can't fail at now that they've grown up and sold their dreams for monthly rent and an ergonomic chair. You listen to them, nodding, pretending you still believe dreams matter, even as you feel your own dreams slipping further away, like fading echoes.

Months pass, maybe years. You stop speaking the language you invented. You forget the dictionary. The toothpaste gets crusty around the cap. Suddenly, you're talking about dental bills and mortgage rates. The dream is now about making it to next Friday. The things you once laughed about now become points of contention. The quirks that were once endearing are now annoyances that grate on your nerves. You know where this ends—every love story has a shelf life. You see it in every empty stare across the dinner table, every sigh that lingers in the silence between you. But you keep going because there's nothing worse than an empty house. Because the thought of being alone is heavier than the weight of all the resentment building between you.

Until one day, the world ends.

Not with a bang. Not with a whimper. No mushroom cloud. No flaming apocalypse. The world ends on a Tuesday afternoon, with an unceremonious email. Subject line: "Your Love Expiration Date Has Been Reached."

Everyone gets it. Turns out, love—actual, biological, measurable love—is finite. The message is algorithmic, generated by the meta-data of your every interaction. Texts, shared playlists, the number of times you touched. Your most intimate moments—logged and quantified—determined you had used up every ounce of affection. There’s an app now. Calculates the exact date and time. Matches it to every fight, every apology, every smile. Your love balance, depleted. Zero in your account.

People knew something was up, they just didn’t know what. The slow decline in relationships, the unexplained distance that grew between partners—turns out, it wasn’t just drifting apart. It was chemistry, pure and simple. Love had a half-life, like radioactive decay, ticking down, irreversible. Suddenly, relationships are stock portfolios. People selling off emotions, hedging against affection, rationing "I love yous" like they're toilet paper during a pandemic. You start seeing ads for love insurance. "Protect your relationship against emotional bankruptcy!" People buying policies, paying premiums to cover their hearts from the inevitable.

A new trend: break up before you run out. They call it pre-emptive emotional liquidation. Say goodbye while there's still a sliver of hope left, like a gambler cashing out before they’re broke. It's a way to remember the good times, to hold on to a version of your partner that isn't tainted by the depletion, the exhaustion. Couples split while they're still smiling, still happy enough to take a last selfie, toasting to their almost-happily-ever-after. A new kind of nostalgia. The one where you pretend the ending was always part of the plan.

You look at her. Your partner. Your supposed 'better half.' And there's something in her eyes—a flicker of relief, maybe—when you both realize you’re bankrupt. And there's something in you—a deep, twisted knot of guilt, but also this lightness, a weight gone—because now you have permission to stop trying. It's over. An empty spreadsheet, a zero-sum game. And for a moment, there's a smile. A real one. Because for the first time in a long time, neither of you is pretending. There’s no need to fake it, to put in effort, to fight for something that's already gone.

Except, here's the twist. The real one.

In the app’s fine print, there's a clause: You can purchase love. Renew it, extend it, like a cell phone plan. Buy a little more time. Keep the relationship on life support. It’s cheaper to walk away, but for a monthly fee, you can prolong the inevitable—indefinitely. Just enough affection to smile in public, to function. Just enough to convince your parents at Thanksgiving that everything's fine, to keep up appearances at parties, to avoid the awkward questions from friends who still believe in fairy tales.

So you subscribe. Your bank account dwindles, your credit plunges. You start leasing out your car, your weekends, your pride. Every "I love you" has a price tag, every kiss an invoice, but you keep swiping the card. You work overtime just to afford another month of holding hands, another week of shared dinners where you talk about nothing and everything. You start selling off your hobbies, giving up the things that once made you interesting, all for another month of proximity. You downgrade, cut costs. A cheaper apartment, a second-hand mattress. You pawn your guitar, the one you bought when you thought you'd be a rock star. You start skipping meals, anything to keep the subscription going.

Because, at the end of the day, love might be zero-sum—but loneliness, that's infinite. Loneliness is the overdraft that never ends, the debt that keeps accumulating, interest piling up until it crushes you. So you choose the subscription. You choose the monthly fee, the slow drain, because even the illusion of love is better than the certainty of an empty house. Because even a hollow "I love you" echoes better than silence. And you tell yourself, just like you did in the beginning, "This is different." And maybe, just maybe, you'll believe it again, even if no one else does.