In 12th-century Paris, Peter Abelard was a celebrity intellectual. A philosopher and theologian whose lectures attracted students from across Europe. He was brilliant, argumentative, and keenly aware of his own stature.
Heloise was one of them. Exceptionally educated for her time, fluent in multiple languages, and sharp enough to meet Abelard as an equal in argument, not just admiration.
Their relationship began intellectually and then crossed into something unmistakably personal. It was passionate and unguarded, as intense human feelings often are, sans resistance, early on.
But every silver cloud has a grey lining. And Heloise became pregnant. Now, I don’t know what you think about 12th-century Paris, but it was closer to current-day Haryana than to modern-day Europe. As soon as the news hit, Abelard arranged for her to be hidden away. Under pressure from her family, they married discreetly, trying to contain a situation that had already slipped beyond control.
Now comes the detail that history tends to soften, even though it matters the most.
Heloise did not want to marry Abelard.
Not because she loved him any less, but because she understood the system they were embedded in. Marriage would destroy Abelard’s academic future as it would expose him to the scandal. And It would reduce her own status from a scholar to a liability. Love, she believed, did not need institutional recognition to be real. And institutional recognition, she feared, would ruin them both.
She later wrote that she would rather be Abelard’s mistress than his wife.
The system, however, did not reward such clarity. As it wouldn’t even 900 years hence.
Heloise’ uncle felt dishonoured as good ol’ men of a patriarchal society usually do. Revenge followed. Abelard was attacked at night and castrated. His public life ended instantly. He withdrew into a monastery. Heloise was sent to a convent. They never lived together again.
What survived of this torrid affair were their letters.
Not romantic letters in the way we imagine them now. But long, lucid reflections on love, regret, faith, sacrifice, and what it meant to have felt something real in a world that had no place to hold it safely.
What is striking is how clearly they understood the constraints around their love.
They did not believe that love alone could overcome structure. They knew love could exist, and still be crushed, if the surrounding system could not absorb it.
For most of history, that was the reality of love.
It lived inside rigid structures. Family, class, religion, economics, geography. Choice was limited. Exits were costly. Permanence was assumed. Love usually began before certainty. People stepped into it with incomplete information and learned how to live with the consequences over time.
People did not ask whether a relationship fulfilled them. They asked whether it could hold - them, and their feelings.
At some point, this inverted.
Modern love does not live inside constraint. It lives inside abundance.
We did not merely gain the freedom to choose our partners. We gained visibility into alternatives. Into paths not taken. Into parallel lives we could be living with someone else. Love moved from being something we built around life to something life was expected to optimize for.
This shift did not happen because people became weaker or more selfish. It happened because the environment changed.
Choice expanded dramatically. Social penalties for leaving collapsed. Economic independence increased. Technology made alternatives visible, immediate, and infinite.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the meaning of love shifted.
From commitment to compatibility.
From durability to emotional alignment.
Love became something we waited to feel certain about, rather than something we entered into and shaped over time.
This is where modern dating begins to feel exhausting, not because people are confused, but because the system itself is cognitively and emotionally expensive.
Let’s talk about the gatekeepers of modern love. Hallowed be their name - dating apps!
Most of us would have either personally or vicariously experienced their wrath.
On the love apps of today, for many men, the experience is one of repeated rejection without feedback. A sense of disposability amid much better options. The pressure to perform confidence while suppressing uncertainty. An unspoken competition with dozens of invisible others - the proverbial elephants in the bedroom.
For many women, the exhaustion comes from excess attention without guaranteed safety. From emotional labour without commitment. From ambiguity disguised as freedom. From having to constantly filter intent, sincerity, and risk.
The reasons differ. The fatigue does not.
Both sides feel unseen. Both sides feel replaceable. And both sides are tired of pretending this is what freedom was supposed to feel like.
What sits beneath this exhaustion is not bad behaviour. It is a structural mismatch.
Modern love increasingly operates like a market.
People encounter each other first as profiles rather than as human stories, with decisions made quickly and reversibly. The system rewards keeping options open, encourages constant comparison, and lowers the cost of leaving.
Markets are excellent at optimizing options. Relationships are not.
Relationships require commitment under uncertainty. Markets encourage deferral in search of something better. We have imported the logic of one into the domain of the other and then act surprised when both begin to fail.
For most of history, love struggled because the world around it was too rigid.
Today, love struggles because the world around it is too fluid.
The constraints that once forced people to stay and adapt are gone. In their place, we have flexibility without friction. And with that flexibility came something we were told would liberate us: infinite choice.
The Tyranny of Options
We have been trained, almost religiously, to believe that more options equal better outcomes. It is embedded in how we are raised, how we are advised, how we measure success.
‘Isme aage bahot scope hai’ – the quintessential phrase is the Indian life advice equivalent of ‘Buy Now, Pay Later.’
And it worked beautifully in an era where we were consciously trying to expand our surface area of choices. The aim was to inflate a balloon so big that it could contain enough air to sustain the weight of our infinite dreams.
Study engineering even if you love literature, because scope hai. Take that corporate job even if you want to write, because scope hai. Don’t commit too early to anything – career, city, or person – because better options might emerge.
When opportunities were genuinely limited, expanding your surface area made sense. The more doors you could keep open, the better your odds of finding the right one.
But we are no longer living in that era.
The advice calcified into dogma even as the context transformed. We kept inflating the balloon of choices, believing bigger was always better. Except now we are discovering something uncomfortable: conversing fluently in one language is more meaningful than dreaming in ten.
Massive optionality has an evil twin as part of the package – cognitive overload. And when it comes to consequential decisions like choosing a partner, optionality often crystallizes into paralysis.
Decisions are rarely made in infinite possibility. They are made under bounded reality, shaped by constraints we consciously choose.
In the context of love, this does not mean we should return to old structures. Those systems were often cruel, especially to women. But it does force a more uncomfortable question.
Have we mistaken the removal of constraints for the creation of meaning?
Heloise and Abelard lived in a world where love was dangerous because it had no safe container. We live in a world where love is fragile because it has too many.
Perhaps the question is not why modern love feels so tiring.
Perhaps the question is what kind of constraints love actually needs to survive.
Not imposed ones. Chosen ones.
What would love look like if staying were treated as a skill again, rather than a failure of imagination?
At what point did protecting ourselves from disappointment start costing us intimacy?
And are we asking love to do work that was once shared by families, communities, and time itself?
These are not questions with defined answers. But they may be better questions than asking whether love is broken.
Because love has always existed.
The systems around it are what keep changing.
Subscriber Spotlight
The AI Architect shared his thoughts on Yashraj Sharma’s piece Why Is India’s Governance So Inefficient?
”Solid framework for understanding structual problems vs just blaming corruption. The comparison with China's cadre evaluation system is particualrly sharp, shows how performance metrics can drive local innovation when careers depend on measurable outcomes. That disconect between central control and local execution is basically creating a vacuum where nobody owns results, so the rational move becomes extracting rents instead of building capacity.”
What we’re reading at Wyzr
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.
Schwartz argues that beyond a point, more choice doesn’t make us freer. It makes us more anxious and less satisfied with what we pick. While the book focuses on consumer decisions, the idea translates cleanly to modern dating, where abundance fuels comparison and makes commitment harder to sustain.
Until next time. Happy Valentine’s Week ♥️
Best,
