Between Love and Logic: When We Start Doing the Math

— Thoughts after watching “Materialists”

After watching Materialists, a quiet kind of heaviness lingered in my chest.

Not sadness exactly—more like a subtle exhaustion. The kind that comes from recognizing how much love, in our time, is entangled with fear, logic, and calculation.

It made me wonder: what does love really mean to us, the modern ones?

Is it a kind of investment? A calculated exchange of value?

Or is it simply a way to ease our loneliness—a companion to fill the gaps that life and technology have widened between us?

We live in a world that makes love both simpler and more complicated.

Simpler because the formulas are everywhere—dating apps, compatibility tests, life goals.

And more complicated because in trying to “optimize” our love lives, we often lose the one thing love truly needs: vulnerability.

In the film, Lucy and John were together for five years.

On their anniversary night, they broke up.

She had reserved a fine-dining restaurant downtown.

He hesitated—because he couldn’t afford to pay $20 an hour for parking.

It wasn’t the dinner. It wasn’t even the money. It was the quiet reminder that life with him would always mean compromise. Careful budgeting. Choosing where to eat based on parking fees. Lucy didn’t stop loving him—she just couldn’t live that way anymore.

So she left.

Not because of a lack of love, but because she was tired.

Tired of living life with a calculator in hand.

Tired of a love that constantly felt like not-enough.

Later, Lucy became a successful matchmaker.

Nine couples she paired ended up getting married—by all accounts, she cracked the code of love.

And yet, her client Sophie kept failing.

Sophie wasn’t unworthy.

She just had a list—too long, too specific, too optimized.

Because love, for her, had become a strategic project. But matchmakers don’t create soulmates. And choosing someone doesn’t mean you’re not also being chosen.

“Do the maths,” the film repeated.

Everyone is calculating—age, salary, height, job title, attractiveness.

And when love becomes a numbers game, it becomes exhausting.

Dating is hard, not because love is hard,

but because we’ve made it too conditional.

I think we all know that love takes effort.

But we’ve become too skilled at selection and too afraid of surrender.

It’s no longer enough to feel something.

We want to know that it will work. That it will lead somewhere.

We want guarantees for something that was never meant to be guaranteed.

The more we try to protect ourselves from loss,

the harder it becomes to let someone in.

This film didn’t give me answers.

But it gave me permission to ask questions.

• If a relationship needs to pass a cost-benefit analysis to be worth starting, is it still love?

• If we keep waiting for the “right one,” are we overlooking the people who are already trying to reach us?

• If we’re so afraid of wasting time, who among us is still brave enough to waste it on love?

I don’t have answers.

But I hope I never stop asking.

Maybe what we need is not another perfect match,

but the courage to stop calculating—and start feeling.