What do we deserve in love?

Materialists (2025): Do we choose or do we settle? Does rationality succumb to fate?

It is June 21, 2025, the first day after the Summer Solstice, the first day of days that are getting shorter and shorter. It is hot. My neck is sticky from the sun. I am madly in love. I am sitting on a picnic blanket on the grass under a maple in a garden nestled behind a tree-covered hill between flowerbeds and a tennis club. My lover and I are sharing plums, figs, tea, and cookies, and we’re birdwatching.

I spy with my little eyes… one red cardinal. A bachelor looking for a mate. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” said Jane Austen.

My beau believed that the bird will do just fine. Then, right above our heads, a female flew by and perched onto one of the branches, singing a little tune on repeat. Not long after, our cranberry bachelor joined her. We looked at the two lovebirds above us—she sang, he idled. “He’s playing hard to get (not a good strategy),” said my dearest. Then, she flew onto a pine in…