OPINION | The Economics of Love: Irrational, enduring, unanswerable

When viewed through a transactional lens, love becomes a perpetual negotiation.

Love is often described as priceless, yet more often lived as an exchange. Somewhere between sentiment and strategy lies a spectrum along which most relationships unfold. At one end stands true love, echoing Adam Smith’s moral economy: order emerges not from force or constant intervention, but from voluntary alignment, sympathy, and the quiet coordination of shared values. At the other end lies transactional love, closer in spirit to a Keynesian framework, where endurance depends on continual stimulus, emotional reassurance, material provision, moral pressure, to maintain equilibrium.

The tendency to reduce love to commerce is hardly new. Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, famously converts bonds of affection into ducats, turning devotion into collateral and mercy into a clause. In his ledger-bound world, relationships are contracts, tenderness a liability, grace conditional upon payment. Love is stripped of ambiguity and reduced to arithmetic, a quid pro quo enforced by penalties rather than sustained by faith. This vision has long animated philosophical and economic debate: whether attachment is anything more than strategic exchange, whether intimacy itself is simply a subtler bargain. It is, perhaps, the enduring temptation to answer love too quickly, to close the question before sitting with its discomfort.

Limits of Transactional Logic

Viewed through a transactional lens, love becomes a perpetual negotiation. Each gesture of care hints at an ulterior motive; every sacrifice anticipates deferred return. In this convex equilibrium, affection is shadow-priced, emotions arbitraged, commitment justified only by expected yield. The model is austere, unsentimental, even bracingly realistic. Yet it collapses under scrutiny. If love truly obeyed market logic, rational actors would divest the moment costs outweighed benefits, exiting when expected value dipped negative or risk became intolerable. A theory that predicts abandonment precisely where humans persist has confused accounting for understanding.

Empirically, humans do nothing of the sort. They love amid radical uncertainty and foreseeable catastrophe, embracing rejection, grief, exile, even death. They persist where the calculus yields unmistakable loss. Such behaviour cannot be explained as remuneration delayed; it endures because withdrawal exacts a deeper existential cost. Bollywood’s tragic archetypes capture this vividly: Devdas’s self-destructive devotion or the terminal tenderness of Kal Ho Naa Ho are not prudent investments, but acts of faith in meaning itself. These are not strategies of gain, but refusals of diminishment, choices made not because success is assured, but because the alternative feels unlivable.

Chosen Value and Rational Endurance

Ayn Rand, the uncompromising apostle of self-interest and critic of altruism as moral sacrifice, sharpened this distinction. She rejected the notion that love requires self-abnegation or duty, arguing instead that love, at its highest, is selfish in the rational sense: chosen, not owed; expressive of one’s deepest values rather than imposed by need. Valuation, in this view, is not barter. To cherish another is neither extraction nor self-erasure, but the affirmation of something profoundly life-enhancing. Love is justified not by consequence, but by coherence with one’s own conception of a life worth living.

Properly understood, this position neither collapses love into transaction nor elevates altruism as surrender. One gives not because one must, but because one chooses, because the beloved represents a value integral to one’s own flourishing. Endurance, then, is sustained not by sacrifice, but by the continued, rational recognition of value. Those who persist do so knowingly, not blindly, aware that meaning, unlike profit, cannot be hedged.

Love Beyond Accounting and Explanation

The insistence on reading such devotion as disguised self-interest often renders transactional theories unfalsifiable. Altruism is retrofitted as optimized egoism; sacrifice recast as deferred gratification; devotion reframed as delayed yield. Counter-examples are absorbed rather than explained. A model impervious to refutation ceases to do intellectual work. Love, by contrast, frequently flourishes under duress, deepening in terminal shadows, surviving absence, transmuting grief into testament. Bollywood again offers clues: bonds in Rang De Basanti grow fiercer in the face of mortality; Anand transforms sorrow into enduring valuation. This is not exchange logic, but identity affirmed where explanation fails.

To confuse the enabling conditions of love with transactional intent is a category error. Trust, security, and proximity sustain relationships, but love is not offered in order to procure them. Gravity requires mass yet negotiates with no one. One breathes not to accumulate oxygen credits, but because breath is life itself. Indian familial bonds illustrate this clarity: parental love seeks no repayment ledger, as seen in Piku, where devotion persists amid irritation and decline without expectation of return.

Love as Continuity and Question

Love’s most enduring articulation remains immune to commercial reduction. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 stands as an unyielding rebuke to transactional thinking, defining love as immutable, unconditional, and defiant of circumstance. It does not alter when alteration finds, nor bend with the remover to remove. It endures to the edge of doom, its worth incalculable, its constancy absolute. Shakespeare wagers his authorship on this claim: if love bends to condition or exchange, no one has ever loved. Here, love refuses explanation without forfeiting truth.

And yet, love is not chaos. The paradox resolves in complementarity. Love is irrational in inception and rational in endurance. The reckless spark ignites; rational scaffolding, rituals, norms, compromises, sustains it against volatility. Without exuberance, love never begins; without rationality, it collapses. Rationality does not extinguish love; it renders it resilient. If love resembles a market at all, it is not one governed by stimulus and subsidy, but by adaptive order, where differences are negotiated, trust compounds, and value deepens over time. Even so, this order stops short of final comprehension.

Ultimately, both lived experience and enduring literature dismantle the notion of love as commerce. Costs it bears, undeniably, but cost is not price. Risk it embraces, but risk is not strategy. Love is not a cautious trade among parsimonious souls. It is a defiant wager by those who refuse diminishment, a commitment that exhausts probability and spurns accounting. Love is not exchange. Love is continuity.

Persistence as Self-Recognition

Why, then, do we persist? Why do humans do what they do when logic urges retreat, prudence advises exit, and the balance sheet is irredeemably adverse? The answer lies not in incentive, but in identity. We do not love in order to gain; we love in order to remain ourselves. Action follows valuation. What we choose to endure reveals what we refuse to lose. Love is not behaviour explained by outcomes, but by meaning. We stay not because staying pays, but because leaving would fracture something essential. The real question is not what will happen, but who we become if we walk away.

Ayn Rand’s rejection of altruism as moral sacrifice illuminates this with unusual clarity. To love, she argued, is not to dissolve oneself into duty or submit to obligation, but to affirm a value central to one’s own life. Love is selfish, not in the vulgar sense of extraction, but in the profound sense of self-recognition. The beloved is not an expense to be justified nor a debt to be serviced, but a chosen good. Those who love longest are neither martyrs nor optimizers; they are individuals for whom love has become inseparable from a life worth living. To abandon it would not be efficiency, it would be self-betrayal.

Love Beyond Explanation

And still, even this rational framing remains incomplete. Love resists final explanation. It exceeds theory, defies closure, and endures precisely because it cannot be fully rendered intelligible. This is where Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 assumes its deepest relevance. Some questions, Flanagan suggests, are not meant to be answered, only endured. Love is such a question. To demand resolution, to force it into coherence, justification, or proof, is to misunderstand its nature. Love survives because it inhabits uncertainty without fleeing it.

In the final analysis, love is irrational in its beginning, rational in its endurance, and unanswerable in its essence. It is not sanctified by sacrifice, sustained by transaction, or exhausted by explanation. It survives because we choose it, again and again, without proof, without assurance, without closure. That is why, in the end, it is Question 7 only: the question we must keep asking precisely because it has no answers.

Disclaimer: The views and interpretations expressed in this article are strictly personal and based on the authors understanding of the subject. They do not represent the views of any organisation, institutions, or authority and should not be constructed as professional, legal or tax advice. 

(Ateesh Kumar Singh, Additional Secretary at Ministry of Commerce and Industry)  

Views are personal, and do not represent the stance of this publication.