It’s Valentines Day as I write this, which means it is again time for the publication of self-consciously provocative arguments against the existence of/feasibility of/compatibility with modern life of romantic love. I am not, at this stage in my life, particularly exercised about disputing them. I would just note two things. First, that my personal experience tells me that the common observation that long-lasting love does not exist simply isn’t true. I know, and I suspect you know, old couples that have been together for decades that demonstrate the opposite. You might call that rare — I might agree — but “this good thing is rare” and “this good thing doesn’t exist” are very different statements with different intents. The former inspires you to work harder; the latter excuses you for not working at all, which I suspect is the secret sauce in this genre. Second, a vast preponderance of the greatest and most enduring voices in human culture have delivered the message that the purpose of these brief lives is to experience human love, in its many permutations — untold thousands of thinkers and artists and musicians and novelists and philosophers and scientists. And so you can either decide that they’re worth listening to, or that you’re smarter than they are. It’s your call.

But I guess that’s the bigger problem: it really is your call. You can either be in love, or try to be in love, or you can not. As is so often the case, in a culture that prizes freedom in the petty sense above all other things, real freedom is terrifying, and thus denied as often as possible.

I’m less interested in the actual merits of these arguments than I am in the wearying pretense that they are new. Like so many other Big Ideas, the notion that love isn’t real (or is no longer real, a particularly uninspired flavor) is published and repeated over and over again, and each time is represented as the very first time it’s been expressed. You can chock this up to the clickfarming imperative, or to the vagaries of an attention economy, or whatever. All I know is that I read some essayist gravely intoning about the impossibility of love every six months, and each time, they give the distinct impression of someone who sees themselves as Prometheus, bringing fire down from the mountain. More likely you’re bringing click through rate down to accounting. If you think this story is true, tell it, but recognize that it’s an old folktale, not some cutting-edge provocation. I’m afraid you’ll just have to reconcile yourself to being yet another grubby plebe like the rest of us, dutifully passing around the same grey-haired old ideas. There are worse things in life.

The thing about contrarianism as a publishing goal isn’t just that you end up constantly printing straightforwardly dumb ideas that even the writer doesn’t really believe, in that classic Slate-pitchy way. It’s also that to adopt a contrarian pose you’ve got to invent a human consciousness to be contrary to. And that, in turn, presumes a juvenile conception of people as idea-generation machines, like we all walk around interpreting events and Having Ideas about them, that every distinct segment of the perpetual flow of our mental lives is processed and reassembled in the idea factory of our brains. I would like to imagine that, in an era of a powerful imperative to make the ephemeral experience of being a person as digestible and interpretable to other persons as possible, there’s room to think things that aren’t yet thoughts.

Ideas are boring. Ideas are cheap. I still feel compelled to teach my writing students the concept of the thesis, because no matter what some idealistic members of my profession might want to believe, students still need and will always need to apply writing as a mechanical tool that helps them to secure practical and vocational needs. (Yes, folks.) But I’m not sure I’ve ever had a “thesis” in my life. I experience life from this particular place. It’s mine and I own it. I take that experience and, I hope, make parts of it more or less comprehensible as I choose. The purpose is to clarify only in the service of a greater desire to obscure. I fail, and I do it again. If you’re an essayist, this is all I ask of you in turn. Give me everything in your essays but your ideas. Never ideas.

Unless, of course, you got some really good ones.