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 the distance, and it took a worrisome amount of time for the knight to follow up. We started to doubt that this couple will work out. In the end, we decided not to judge (we don’t know their story after all).
The picnic was cut short by rain so we decided to go see Materialists.
There’s a common slogan in modern dating: “you accept the love you think you deserve.” It’s usually used to describe the act of self-sabotage where someone ruins something good because they’re used to something worse, and they confuse familiarity with fit (they’re not your type, they’re your pattern). We say “never settle” to encourage those in the dating game to maximize their result, to get the exact person they ask for, like “Emily’s face but Julia’s body and Lily’s personality” or “750K/year before tax, 6’5”, full head of hair”—as if we all know we have some Platonic ideal that we can only bribe our fairy godmother to get us closer to, but have to eventually accept that perfection does not exist. When we measure people with checkboxes, “good enough” is the best anyone can be.
Celine Song seems to say “we accept the love we think we deserve” not as a diagnosis of what’s wrong with modern romance but as a prophecy and how rationality succumbs to fate. The message at the core of Materialists: People deserve each other. In a way, in the end, you get exactly what you deserve. They might not be perfect, but they can be perfect for you. Nobody settles; everyone gets someone who is perfect for them.
There’s something karmic about how life unfolds, like everything that you have and everything that happens to you is a result of, through various degrees of butterfly effects, what you’ve put out there.
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
―Joan Didion
We seem to know this intuitively, but have a hard time admitting it—to ourselves and to society—because when we do, we confess that everything wrong with our lives is indeed our fault: there is something wrong with us. We’re massively messed up in some way that everyone else sees but no one is telling us. And like puzzle pieces, we’re supposed to find someone who “fits” our shape.
So, here’s the dilemma: on one hand, Materialists says, “People are people are people are people. They come as they are.” On the other hand, you’re encouraged to keep fishing until you find the one that matches your criteria. The culture says, if you’re not living the life you chose, then you’re living the life you settled for. In other words, you didn’t do your best and, in some way, you failed. There was a right answer and you chose wrong.
We try to make love a logic problem. We compare resumes and habits and potential like we’re early stage investors. We talk about “fit,” as if relationships are ergonomic. We date people who, in the words of Materialists, “make us feel valuable,” as if the point of love is personal gain, to make us feel good about ourselves. But love isn’t optimization, it’s interruption. Love happens. And when the person you love arrives, you adjust, not because they complete your shape, but because they’ve changed it. “You get what you deserve” doesn’t mean we deserve punishment or failure, but that we meet people who reflect what we’re ready to learn. And often, the most loving thing isn’t finding someone who checks all the boxes, but someone who makes you forget there were boxes at all.
So when Materialists says, “people are people are people are people,” it’s not a rejection of standards—it’s a rejection of illusion. The illusion that people can be evaluated by market terms, that desirability has a formula, that chemistry can be right and wrong, that failure to find perfection is a moral flaw. Even the “invisible string theory” (romantic destiny) or in-yun, which sit at the core of Celine Song movies, is a Wittgensteinian attempt to make love understandable:
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
—Jane Austen (Emma)
Celine Song isn’t saying that passion trumps money or that economic security guarantees happiness—love and material are not at odds. Love cares about courage and being true more than it does about being correct about how someone measures up to our standards.
“Marriage is business deal but love has to be on the table.” —Lucy breaking up with Harry, the ultra-wealthy bachelor in Materialists
“It’s really hard for me to feel like this is not about the legs.” —Harry not understanding why Lucy is breaking up with him if it’s not about the leg-lengthening surgery
We are all materialists. Not because we’re shallow but because we are material beings born into a material world with the innate knowledge that we are meant for more than that. We are souls in a flesh vehicle, seeking love in the form of other materialists. That’s what Ecclesiastes 3:11 means by “He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet so that man will not find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end”—we are born with a sense of what infinite, unconditional love feels like, and so we seek it, but we are absolute children in figuring out how it all works or how we play a role in all of it. Thirst alone proves that water exists.
We’re materialists not because we’re shallow but because material is all we have in the matters of love: words are all we have to express our feelings, actions are all we have to show how much we care, money is all we have to create gestures of affection—in the face of true love, none of these are enough. Earthly possessions pale in the face of love, yet omakase and Tribeca penthouses are all we have to offer.
Desire proves that love is real—when love happens, when it exits Plato’s cave, it might not resemble the ideal promised by logic. But in order for love to happen, it must be real. It’s two real people using limited means to reach for something infinite. It’s two real people walking each other home.
Beneath all the box-checking, age filtering, swiping, brokered matchmaking, and economical weighing of who “deserves” who based on socioeconomic backgrounds, education level, salary, and so forth, there is fate. And fate has an open ear that hears our prayers and, sometimes, considers what we want.
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Suggested!
True love goes beyond material things yet material things are the ways we know to show true love. And yet the absence of love in the presence of material things isn’t enough. The irony of life😭
I relished every word of this. Stunning