Her name is Diana. Her father named her after Princess of Wales Diana Spencer. She was born two years after the Princes passed away on an accident in Paris. Diana was deeply in love once. Or at least she thought she was. Korchi, the funny thing about love is that nobody tells you it can look suspiciously similar to a psychiatric episode. According to Hollywood and the music industry, if you can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think straight, and are willing to throw yourself off a metaphorical cliff for someone, congratulations, you’ve found your soulmate. In reality, if you present those symptoms to a doctor, they may have a slightly different diagnosis.

When she was in love, Diana was not the best version of herself. She was obsessive. Possessive. Emotionally unstable. Her entire nervous system became a customer service department dedicated exclusively to one person. She would stay awake all night waiting for a text. Her heart would race when she didn’t hear from her lover. Her mind would immediately assume the worst whenever he went out without her. Her hands would shake. Her stomach would twist. She became a full-time detective investigating crimes that had never happened. The irony was that on the rare days when she received enough attention and affection, she felt invincible. Suddenly she was productive, confident, motivated, and capable of conquering the world. Her emotional state was essentially the stock market, except one man was the entire economy. This is where she started suspecting that maybe movies and songs had not been entirely honest with all of us.

Think about it Korchi. How many romantic movies end with two people falling in love and living happily ever after? Almost all of them. How many songs tell us that life is meaningless without “the one,” that we’d never survive losing them, or “that no one could ever compare”? Thousands. Entire industries have made billions convincing us that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to find one person who magically completes us. The formula is brilliant from a business perspective. Create an impossible fantasy. Sell it. Then sell the heartbreak when reality inevitably fails to match it. Rinse and repeat.

Take that famous 90s song by K-Ci & JoJo, All My Life. “I will never find another lover sweeter than you.” Really? Never? How exactly does one know that? Did they conduct a comprehensive survey of all future romantic possibilities across the next fifty years? Did they receive a confidential report from the universe? What if there are five sweeter lovers? What if there are twenty? What if one of them is currently stuck in traffic somewhere? The older she gets, the more absurd these declarations sound. Yet many human beings internalized them as children. From the industry, Diana learned that true love should be overwhelming and obsession is romantic. She also learned that jealousy is passion and suffering is proof of devotion. And perhaps the most dangerous lesson of all is she learned that being loved by someone else is what makes her complete. No wonder breakups feel catastrophic to her.

At some point, while recovering from her self-inflicted romantic disaster, she stumbled into evolutionary psychology. This was either a sign of personal growth or simply a more sophisticated way of overthinking. What she discovered was deeply inconvenient. Human beings have been arguing about monogamy for centuries because their biology and their social structures do not always seem to be reading from the same instruction manual. Modern culture often presents lifelong monogamy as the natural and obvious destination of human romance. Find your person. Stay together forever. Die within three days of each other while holding hands on a porch somewhere. It’s a beautiful story. It’s also a relatively recent one. Human history reveals a much messier picture. Across different societies and different periods of time, humans have practiced everything from monogamy to polygamy to arrangements that would give modern relationship coaches a nervous breakdown. This raises an uncomfortable question, if lifelong monogamy were completely effortless and instinctive, why have human beings spent thousands of years creating laws, religions, moral codes, songs, novels, and entire industries dedicated to convincing us to do it? Nobody writes twelve-volume epics encouraging people to remember to breathe. Nature handles that part on its own. The things societies constantly preach are usually the things that do not come naturally to everyone.

Sometimes she wonders if men and women were given slightly different operating systems and then expected to run the same software. Some research suggests that novelty can affect sexual desire differently across individuals and sexes, while other studies show that emotional bonding, familiarity, and attachment can deepen attraction over time. In other words, nature appears to enjoy making things unnecessarily complicated. The result is that many people spend their lives caught between competing forces such as biological impulses, emotional needs, cultural expectations, religious values, legal obligations, and whatever terrible advice they absorbed from romantic comedies in the early 2000s.

Korchi, modern society chose monogamy largely because it provides social stability, simplifies inheritance, organizes families, and prevents civilization from descending into complete administrative chaos. Which is understandable. Nobody wants to file tax returns for seventeen spouses. But whether human’s emotional hardware has fully adapted to their social software remains an open question. Perhaps the real problem is not monogamy itself. Perhaps the problem is that humans have turned it into mythology. They don’t merely expect one person to be their partner. They expect them to be their best friend, soulmate, therapist, co-parent, travel companion, financial advisor, emotional support animal, spiritual guide, and exclusive source of romantic fulfillment until death. It’s an extraordinary amount of pressure to place on one ordinary human being. And when that impossible arrangement inevitably develops cracks, they blame themselves for failing at love rather than questioning the fantasy they were sold in the first place.

If humans have spent their entire life believing that finding true love is the ultimate achievement, then losing it would feel like failing the final exam of existence. The tragedy is that most of them never learned what love actually is. They learned what screenwriters, novelist and songwriters needed love to be. After all, “I developed healthy emotional boundaries and maintained a secure sense of self” doesn’t sell nearly as many movie tickets as “I crossed an ocean, committed several felonies, and nearly died for love.”. The entertainment industry understands one thing extremely well that healthy love is beautiful, but dysfunctional love is profitable. For years, Diana voluntarily subscribed to that illusion. When she wasn’t in love, she felt incomplete. When she was heartbroken, she felt like a failure. If a relationship ended, she treated it as evidence that something was fundamentally wrong with her rather than a normal part of being human. Love became both her drug and her suffering.

Slowly she understands why people who grow up in emotionally chaotic environments like her, often become extraordinarily sensitive to affection and validation. When emotional nourishment is scarce during childhood, attention can feel less like a pleasant experience and more like oxygen. A child who grows up emotionally deprived becomes accustomed to hunger. Then one day someone arrives and offers a feast. Of course, the experience feels overwhelming and transformative. The brain isn’t necessarily responding to love itself. It may be responding to the sudden relief of a lifelong shortage. This is why love bombing can be so effective. To someone who has never been consistently emotionally fed, excessive attention can feel miraculous rather than suspicious. She is not merely falling in love. She is experiencing the temporary satisfaction of an old emotional hunger.

That revelation changed her perspective about love. She is now conscious enough to understand that what she thought was love was often attachment. What she thought was losing a soulmate was frequently losing access to a feeling. Movies and songs taught Diana that love should consume her. But life eventually taught her something else. Love that requires her to lose herself is not romance. It’s just a very expensive way of abandoning herself while somebody else gets the credit.