from "Loving the Football" by Jeremy Fernando:

"The notion that haunts relationships is that of goodness; usually taking the form of the question, how good is the other person?

Facing a situation where every utterance, every gesture, is a conflation of the constative and the performative. For, even if one were making a statement that was true (“I was home last night”), the statement cannot be divorced from any, all, of its potential — known and unknown — effects. This suggests that in order for one to lead the other person into a judgement that one is good, one has to not only be able to say the right things, one would also have to be a good judge of how the other judges. And since there is no a priori framework for judging (it can alter with the day, mood, or for no reason whatsoever), one has to constantly be judging which statements to put forth.

Which means: to be successful at this game, one has to be truly diabolical. Not just merely manipulative: for, that still allows for certain consistency of the self.

The irony, of course, is that even if one succeeds, not only does the other person remain a complete unknown (which is perfectly fine considering one cannot actually know another person), the one that the other has fallen for is also a performed you. Which means that: all you have done is to have given yourself more performing to do.

But it is not as if anyone doesn’t already know this. And yet, we still fall in love.

Which suggests that we all want to be deceived.

And more than that, we are drawn towards another that can, not only deceive us well, but — more importantly — can make us deceive, not only them but our own selves as well.

And this is why one falls in love: not in some silly rom-com breezy sense, but falling in the precise sense of a crumbling. Where one’s sense of self is utterly destroyed. Where one is literally out of one’s mind. Where, for two persons to be in a relationship, there has to be complete and utter deception — of both the other and oneself — all whilst maintaining the illusion that you are still yourself to the other.

Which means that: love is evil."

(I wouldn't want to be that guy's girlfriend, eh?)