Nietzsche argues that love is wanting to "borrow" traits from another. But what traits would you borrow that you do not highly esteem? And how would we describe a natural process of comparing thousands of variables to find a proximate compatibility match?

Love comes in many forms. One loves one's friends, meaning respects them, and appreciates what they do. One loves one's family, because they are similar in form and direction, and together the whole family support each other. One loves certain works of art or thinking because they give something transcendent. And romance? Looking beyond the shallow "convenience" concept of modern romance, one can see the purest sense of the older term: romance was a friendship that had potential to not only exist for those immediately involved, but for future people. It was a caring in perpetuity balanced with the highest compliment one can grant to another, that of wishing to merge with them genetically for the production of a new organism.

Our hollywood^tm sense of "love" is a religious one. We believe we will be incomplete without the other, and with them, we can exist as a whole and have a future ahead of us. To my mind, this is like drug addiction: there is a presupposition that the world sucks and therefore you need some kind of sweet treat to make it bearable at all.

I don't believe that, at all, about life and how to live it.