I Love You But I Don’t Think This Will Work: How To Hold Love Longer in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modern World

Love is a checkmate between forever and impermanence. It is a delicate balance where desire marches ahead, followed by the shadow of uncertainty. In the grammar of the modern age, this phrase or any similar-sounding negotiation hits us like a typhoon, especially if we are not the ones saying it but the ones hearing it. 

What does this even mean? Someone is emotionally intelligent enough to accept and acknowledge their love for us, but not emotionally available enough to offer the warmth and support we crave? To be the one who gets to hear this, it is heart-wrenching (only if one is wishing too hard for their ship to sail), and to be the one who says this, it is both awkward and difficult.

When someone says they love us but also believes we shouldn't be together, we instantly burden them with the title of a liar. Because if the love is real, it would of course fear no number of long jumps or somersaults needed to finally walk untroubled. We say to ourselves that they either love us or they don’t. Anything in between feels like nothing short of a betrayal, a quiet form of lying. (“If they wanted to, they would” philosophy.)

Romanticism advocates that love conquers all—that if it’s real, nothing else should matter. D.H. Lawrence, long back, echoed this, saying a man in love will sleep for the rest of his life on a park bench for a woman he loves. But real life isn’t fiction, even though it's majorly motivated by it. Love doesn’t erase distance, trauma, or incompatible futures. In contrast to the ideal of all-conquering love, there exists a contradicting philosophy, one that values emotion and acknowledges reality. This perspective doesn’t diminish love, but it just simply insists that love alone cannot cancel out everything else. It honours the heart while also making space for life’s more difficult truths.

But to think of this peculiar situation that this generation, in comparison to any other, suffers from, there lies somewhat of an answer given by a Polish-born sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman. Back in my fourth semester, I was first introduced to Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity, which I carelessly skipped after bargaining its chances of appearing in the exam, only to read it later out of general curiosity. 

To explain “liquid modernity” in simpler terms, imagine the very characteristics of fluids and gases, especially under pressure. A solid, when twisted, maintains its shape and springs back to its original position upon being released. But the inherent nature of liquids, that is, liquidity or fluidity, has turned out to be a metaphor for the modern age or modern world. In Bauman’s world, permanence is not the rule but the exception. This freedom to fly, offered to us by the liquid modern world, might feel thrilling at first. The countless choices we can make without necessarily having to be held accountable for all or most of them feel quite non-hectic. But the real challenge comes when you are tired of your freedom of flying and want to land upon a branch that is worthy enough to halt upon, for a moment, or maybe forever. 

What Did Bauman Mean By Liquid Love

Although Zygmunt Bauman's book Liquid Love was published in 2003, I believe it is more relevant to the recent era than ever. It’s true that Bauman’s take on the modern world isn’t what most would call rosy, and maybe that’s why his art speaks so directly to anyone whose lens is a little bit cynical. Yet what makes Bauman stand out is that beneath his observations, there’s a subtle undertone of compassion and a persistent urge to make meaning of this frailty rather than simply mourn it. Love has lost its solidity, and bonds that are entered into with a hope to withstand storms are running aside looking for shelters as soon as the sky begins to darken. Once the discomfort sets in, tapping on the “delete” button might seem like a choice that favours one’s mental peace. So, love is no longer the brick you build your home with but a bucket full of water that you wash your floors with (useful for a moment and wiped out before it becomes an inconvenience).  

Why Modern Love Feels So Precarious

The society has become what chatgpt describes as “fast-paced.” So, in this fast-paced world, the biggest matchmaker (equally competent and influential) is social media. Dating apps are just an improvised version of the matrimonial sites that are still foreign to the generation finding it hard to match the speed of this fast-paced world. Life doesn’t feel slow, nor it is, unless you are thrown into a rural area, stripped of essentials. It’s funny to ponder how Bauman wrote about this concept long before social media or dating apps were a thing.

Modern love is as balanced as the feet of a newbie on a pointed heel. It feels this way because almost everyone today is in a state of “work in progress”—an artwork in the making, a product not yet launched. In Bauman’s words as well, love doesn’t live in things that are already done, completed, or finished; it thrives in the building, the construction, the ongoing process. 

And yet, today, so many people walk into relationships expecting their partner to arrive “perfect” and flawless from the very inception. But what is this perfect state that every partner has to achieve if not to be moulded by the preferences of another? Such an expectation only welcomes anxiety as a guest. This precariousness is heightened when we mistake love for desire. At first glance, the two feel similar—both bring excitement, sparks, and energy, what Gen Z casually calls butterflies or a “vibe match.” However, it would be foolish of us to expect a butterfly to sit on our fingertip forever, right?

Desire, Bauman explains, is the impulse to consume: to devour, absorb, and ultimately discard. When put in the context of modern dating apps, it feels uncomfortably and hauntingly true. People often become products—swiped, matched, briefly enjoyed, and then abandoned. Desire gives us quick thrills, but it doesn’t build the foundation love needs to survive. And it is scary to think what an entire generation like this, dwelling on uncertainty and cheap thrills, might do when faced with solid decisions like marriage and parenthood. 

Bauman’s liquid love is a question that stretches back to Martin Buber, who nearly a century ago argued that most of our encounters are “I-It” and not “I-thou.” We treat others as objects—experiences to consume, use, or move past—rather than meeting them as whole, living presences. This is where promises become fragile too. As Adrienne Burgess notes, “Promises of commitment are meaningless in the long term.” Words alone can’t hold a relationship; actions do. And yet, most of us are inconsistent even with ourselves. We make promises like “I’ll leave junk food” or “I’ll start tomorrow” without following through. If our words fail us in the personal, how much weight do they carry in the relational?

So why does love feel precarious today? Because it sits in tension between the innocence of love and the hunger of desire, between the promises we make and the actions we fail to take, between wanting someone complete and learning to build together. 

Is There Hope for Lasting Love?

In the summers of the 20th Century, Rainer Maria Rilke writes some poignant words that reverberate with the fear of performance lurking beneath an act of love—specifically, his seventh letter, penned in May 1904, says, “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.” Bauman, nodding to this same courageous labour, suggests that hope for lasting connection isn’t found by building walls against the modern world. It might not necessarily mean deleting all social media handles or dating apps and throwing away your phone into an unknown abyss.

As Rilke himself writes elsewhere, “A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude... if they succeed in loving the expanse between them...”. So for love to flourish in this liquid modern world, it first needs to realise that impermanence is the truth, and permanence is to be chosen every day, every morning as you wake up. Love cannot grow on the illusion of solidarity. Its strength lies in fragility, vulnerability, and fluidity as well. The ability of love to flow, holding nothing or no one back, must conquer its urge to chain the lover into one’s own expectations and preferences. So, if the modern world is liquid and ever-flowing, we must find the one with whom we want to float for the rest of our lives.