Love on a Budget?

Love? What about it?

There is someone, somewhere staring up at the ceiling. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s their office, or bedroom, or maybe it’s just God’s ceiling, as cloudy or as dreadfully dark as ever. They are looking deep for the answer to their question, but the capitalist world demands they already know the conclusion. Do I need money to seek love?

Maybe they’re unemployed.

Maybe they’re jam-packed in a job that’s low-paying, going nowhere, but the way the economy is moving makes no sense abandoning. Maybe they feel like an imposter. Wanting a secure relationship that is real, that is rooted, while their own life feels topsy-turvy, always moving with the next gig or job that will only last a few weeks before the hunger pains restart.

There is someone out there in these situations and in others we cannot even think of who feels that love is too expensive. I don’t mean just one date; I mean all of them. I don’t mean one trip, I mean all of them. Life that has become so small, the peephole has shrunk because of finances and has left you blind to the possibility you are worth something that should be free.

Your hand being held.

You body being held tightly inbetween someone else’s arms in a warm embrace no one can separate.

Perhaps, a conversation that stops time, but is about the most mundane movie you saw years ago.

Love shouldn’t cost a thing. But the mechanisms to attain it can, depending on your culture, depending on your world, which we all share. And some of us carry the stains of that truth.

What is the price tag on these things? In our world it’s incalcuable, because money is a proxy for stability in partnership. It signals dependability when dependability in other avenues feels too intangible to quantify. It signals ambition where dreams can just be words meant to woo the other. Sometimes we take for granted that these things, shouldn’t be attached to the other.

Is it possible to have love on a budget? Is it possible to take someone out for riveting conversation on a first date with coffee in both sets of hands without it be percieved as how I value you?

Is it possible for her, to have burdenned on her shoulders the weight of college debt, and her partner or potential partner not see her as baggage?

It’s easy to rationalize all of this in our world. the holding back of one soul in reaching another, until they get it together.

“I gotta be more stable.”

“I gotta get my life right.”

“I gotta get rid of this debt first.”

I gotta be able to buy the house first.”

I gotta be free.”

“I gotta be “not broke.”

Some people hold true to this thought. They don’t date. They hold that person in their heart in solidarity hoping that when they do find their way back to their feet, for the first time, or the second, it won’t be too late. They won’t be swept away by someone richer, someone free of debt.

Others are too hungry for it. They don’t care, they will have love or the image of it at all costs, regardless of their situations. And we don’t look fondly at them.

Regardless of what side of the line you are on, I ask not of your motives or you behavioral patterns, but just to ponder the life you live.

We hide human connection behind these practical truths and our wilting souls are the evidence. Is this right? Are we right? I hope so. Because this seems like a dreadful reality we have created for ourselves and passed down from mother to daughter, father to son, where love bears no price tag, but it does have too many operating fees.

Is financial strife and love incompatible? If it is then the few stories we have heard of homeless people meeting and loving each other in their hopeless places are just unicorns. And if those are anomalies, and the truth is that love is too expensive for some more than others, what does that say about love then?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.