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In Defense of Being Crazy in Love

BYChaima Gharsallaoui

August 26, 2026

I recently came across an Instagram reel of a couple climbing the spire of the Empire State Building to get engaged. It already had 14 million views. I immediately sent it to my friend with the message, “This is the kind of love I wish for.” Her response? “Oh baby, that’s crazy in love.”

I went back to the comments, half-expecting to discover I was the only unhinged romantic in the room. I wasn’t. There were thousands of comments, written in half a dozen languages, alongside memes, news headlines, and reaction videos that made me realize that perhaps people weren’t necessarily obsessed with the stunt itself. They were obsessed with the madness of it; the excess. The willingness to do something completely unreasonable in the name of love.I always wondered if I was completely detached from the reality of what relationships actually were. Sometimes, I blamed my more delusional ideas about love on the books and texts I consumed as a teenager. I remember digging through my mom’s stack of books and finding a few I probably had no business reading that early in life. One of them was Plato’s Symposium.

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Long story short, it’s about a bunch of men drinking and taking turns praising Eros, the Greek god of love. At one point, Aristophanes tells the myth that humans were once round beings with four arms and four legs, until Zeus split them in two as punishment for their pride. Love, according to the story, is the lifelong ache of searching for that missing half, driven by the desire to become whole again. Naturally, teenage me absorbed this less as an ancient philosophical allegory and more as a basic fact of life. I rolled with it as a given.

No wonder, then, I couldn’t wrap my head around so many of the concepts of modern dating. I remember walking along a river with a longtime friend from university as she told me about a new guy she was seeing. He was great, she said. They had loads in common, she liked him, and things were going well. Naturally, I asked if they were together. She said no. I have learned some relevant vocabulary over the years, and that was the right time to use it. “So, are you guys exclusive?”

“Yes, but we are not together.”

What the hell does being together mean, then? I made no attempt to hide my confusion, until she finally explained: “We’re not together because we’re both scared of catching feelings.”

Aha! Here it was. I understand it now: the paradox of love. The epiphany came to me as I was walking home from this conversation. People are not scared of catching feelings. They fear the helplessness that comes after believing. The discourse online has, for years, been filled with talk about toxic relationships, red flags, what could go wrong, and all sorts of advice on how to avoid worst-case scenarios. Recipe after recipe for what is the right relationship. A puritanized plot of what is guaranteed to work. And fair enough. Coming from a household of divorced parents, I know exactly what that costs.

@sarcasticsirenuk #Meme #MemeCut #SituationshipSaga #TooComplicatedForLove ♬ original sound – 💎TRIX❤️‍🔥

However, I never bought into this particular brand of emotional cowardice. To me, it always felt like collective psychosis exacerbated by how precarious everything else had become. When capitalism and the broader political reality already leave people feeling overworked, underpaid, and powerless, perhaps the last thing anyone wants is to feel that same lack of control in their personal life. So they turn to the one thing they can try to manage: their relationships with other people. They attempt to strip it of all possible risk that comes from powerlessness. They try to predict every way they might be screwed over, and ration out their hearts accordingly. That, in the personal and political spheres, always produces mediocre results.

The romantic sphere has become overly regulated. We have become so paranoid about making the wrong choice that we increasingly approach intimacy as something to manage rather than experience. Instead of trusting ourselves to recognize bad behavior when it happens, leave when necessary, recover when hurt, and survive disappointment, we try to eliminate the possibility of any of it happening in the first place. We mistake avoiding pain for emotional intelligence.

And I don’t think this instinct is confined to dating. You can see the same fear everywhere. In politics, people are constantly instructed to vote against the worst possible outcome rather than for something they genuinely believe in. Cynicism gets confused with intelligence, pragmatism with maturity, and hope becomes something slightly embarrassing, reserved for people who apparently haven’t learned their lesson yet.

The past few years have complicated that logic. Donald Trump returned to the White House despite years of warnings about what another presidency could mean, and the catastrophe people were told to organize their entire political imagination around avoiding happened anyway. Yet on the other side of that fear, something interesting has been happening. People haven’t necessarily become more cautious. In some places, they have become more willing to take chances on candidates and ideas they were previously told were too ambitious, too idealistic or simply impossible.

That is partly what made Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York feel so significant to me. Whatever you think of him politically, his appeal was built around asking people to believe that government could materially improve their lives. The response to some of his proposals revealed how unfamiliar that belief had become. People seemed genuinely surprised by the suggestion that politics might offer them something beyond choosing the person they feared least.

Maybe love has been suffering from the same crisis of imagination. Avoidance was never healing. It just simply postponed the invoice for all the dirty psychological piles on the chair in the corner of one’s heart. Sometimes, taking the big risk that costs you something real is necessary to finally see what needs to be worked on. You only get real love by hitting the thing you were avoiding, hard enough that you can’t pretend anymore.

@thedancingtherapist_ #attachmentstyle #relationships #fyp #blacktherapistoftiktok #MemeCut #MemeCut #MemeCut #Meme ♬ original sound – itsciararache’ 💕

To believe in love is to believe in the possibility of a revolution. I do not mean the pitchfork kind, but one where the people in power do what they are supposed to do. Being madly in love is exhilarating. It makes you surpass the powerlessness of the daily and become capable of scaling the highest building in New York City. It might even make you a hero. Love is for the brave, because to love requires risking naiveté and the capacity to face things head-on.

I know for a fact that being madly in love is making a comeback. All over the United States people have been electing anti-establishment Democrats, “mini-Mamdanis”. All over Europe, an anti-right sentiment has been rising and will lead to major confrontations in the coming elections. People are slowly returning to glorifying love, cheering for the most enamored celebrity couples, saying no to situationships and ambiguous, fearful dynamics, and saying out loud that they believe in romance. People have been speaking up for Palestine, and for all the other just causes of the world. That requires bravery.

I know for a fact that being madly in love is making a comeback when I see people cheering for Sanchez’s Spain Vs Milei’s Argentina, against the alleged corruption of FIFA, and the rampant racism in football.

The collective heart is leaving cynicism and nonchalance behind, now moved by an invisible fight filled with hope. Everyone seems to be realizing that just maybe love, revolution, and justice are not just a fool’s dream. They are not only possible but the only things worth pursuing.

Over the years, I have tried to help end some mediocre dynamics in the lives of friends and strangers — not always to success. I have also instigated some wonderful love stories. I consider my greatest political achievement to be my contribution to the mad love propaganda, to which I added by sending the reel of the Empire State Building couple to anyone who was willing to watch, and writing this piece.

In Defense of Being Crazy in Love

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In Defense of Being Crazy in Love

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