So, what? Are we getting married?

Love has two enemies, and both sleep at home.

For years, we were taught that marriage is the natural culmination of love. The happy ending. The goal. The achievement. Social validation. But we were rarely told the truth: love has enemies, and the most dangerous ones are not outside. They have two names, very respectable ones at that, but enemies nonetheless. One is marriage. The other, ideal love.

The first kills love by certainty. The second, by expectation. Marriage is not born as a romantic act, but as a contract. It always was. Its historical function is not to love, but to order: inheritance, children, the family name, patrimony, social stability, consumption. Society benefits from marriage because it reduces chaos, guarantees continuity, and produces predictable citizens. It's no coincidence that even in 2025, we are still pushed —with smiles, traditions, and disguised taboos— to believe that true love must lead there. The problem is not commitment. The problem is confusing commitment with the institutionalization of desire. Love needs uncertainty to breathe. Marriage, on the other hand, is built on the promise of permanence. And when permanence becomes an obligation, love begins to lose its soul. Not suddenly. Not loudly. It loses it through wear and tear.

It is worth clarifying something to avoid comfortable or superficial interpretations. When I speak of marriage here, I refer to marriage as 99.99% of people conceive it —to use an ironically exact figure—: as a closed, definitive, regulated structure, designed to eliminate uncertainty, not to coexist with it. I am not talking about infidelity, parallel affairs, or those narrative shortcuts that some confuse with "spice" or "heat" in a relationship. The uncertainty I refer to has nothing to do with betrayals or easy transgressions, but with something more uncomfortable: accepting that the other is not property, that desire cannot be managed, and that authentic love never offers total guarantees.

But if marriage is the structural enemy, ideal love is the intimate enemy. Ideal love is that image that each of us builds in our heads over the years: how the other should love, how they should desire, how they should react, how they should accompany, how they should be. So we marry —or commit— not to the real person, but to the imagined version of that person. And from there the real conflict begins: trying to make the other fit. Here appears the most violent myth of all: "If they love me, they will change." Not to grow, but to adjust. Marriage, combined with ideal love, then becomes the bed of Procrustes: a structure where the other must be stretched or amputated to fit. If they are too free, they are cut down. If they are too different, they are corrected. If they do not respond to the fantasy, they are pressured. And when it doesn't work, love is blamed, never the mold.

The analogy is not accidental. In Greek mythology, Procrustes was not an impulsive killer, but a meticulous host. He offered a perfect bed to his visitors, but demanded that the body adapt to it. If it was too long, he amputated; if it was too short, he stretched. The problem was never the bed, but the other's body. This is how institutionalized love often operates: the mold is not questioned, the person is corrected. Compatibility is confused with obedience, harmony with adjustment, commitment with identity renunciation. And when the other suffers, the structure is not reviewed; they are accused of not fitting in, of not loving well, of not trying hard enough.

But life doesn't work that way. People don't exist to fulfill other people's scripts. Love doesn't survive prolonged domestication. That's why so many relationships die without a grand tragedy. They don't explode: they wither. They become functional, correct, socially acceptable... and profoundly empty. They stay together out of inertia, for children, for fear, for habit, for reputation. They stay together, but they no longer choose each other. To say all this is not to attack marriage or disparage commitment. It is to point out an uncomfortable truth: love does not fare well in cages, even if they are decorated with good intentions.

Perhaps that is why today people are not marrying less, but more. But no longer to last, but to divorce. As if marriage had become a rite of passage to its own shipwreck. It is celebrated with enthusiasm, signed with solemnity, and abandoned with the same naturalness with which a subscription is canceled. And the most unsettling thing is not divorce, but what happens when even that doesn't happen. When marriages don't break up for children, for fear, for habit, or for reputation. When two people who can no longer stand each other continue to sleep in the same bed, sharing an empty intimacy, managing a common life, without desire or choice.

That is the true silent horror: not conflict, but coexistence without love. The normalization of surrender. The domestication of weariness. Seeing the other every night and knowing —without saying it— that they no longer choose each other, and we have become accustomed to confusing stability with resignation. Not because love has failed more than before, but because the structure that promised to contain it has become incapable of sustaining it. Marriage no longer guarantees anything, except the belated realization that two people who loved each other did not know how —or were unable— to live together without destroying each other.

Real love —not ideal love— demands something that almost no one wants to accept: to see the other as they are, not as they should be. And to accept that loving does not guarantee permanence, only authenticity. Perhaps that is why love scares us so much. Because it doesn't promise security. It promises truth. And truth, as always, doesn't fit well into institutions.

I am not trying to destroy anything here, but to highlight something I learned late, but learned well: love does not die because it fails; it dies when we force it to resemble something it never was.