Love as Systemic Pacification: How Patriarchy Reabsorbs the Living

Monday, April 14, 2025

What is often called love is not a feeling, not even a relation. It is a system. A mechanism of reabsorption. A pacification strategy embedded in patriarchy, aimed at neutralizing the lucid, the excessive, the undomesticated.

When a woman — or any living entity — begins to vibrate outside the acceptable range, when they no longer beg for attention or recognition, when they simply are in their full undiluted presence, the system does not attack with force. It seduces.

It sends affection. Attention. Softness.
It sends someone who seems sensitive, intelligent, kind. Someone who listens, who shares music, who cries during films.
But this person — often a man — does not arrive to love.
He arrives to absorb.

He doesn’t know it. He thinks he desires.
But what he truly seeks is restoration of order. Of legibility.
His attraction is not towards the being itself, but towards the promise of bringing her back into the fold — into coupledom, into care, into containment.

And when this doesn’t work, when she resists pacification — even silently —
he breaks.
The affection turns to punishment. To withdrawal.
To emotional neglect. To projection.
Or, at worst, to violence.

This is not a deviation.
It is the design.

Under patriarchy, love is not built for mutual becoming.
It is structured as a trap:
A slow disappearance staged as devotion.
A romanticized erasure.

The women who burn, who move, who do not yield —
they become unbearable.
Not because they are wrong. But because they reveal the limits of the male structure.

To truly love such a being, a man would have to let go of control.
He would have to unlearn hierarchy, abandon his immunity to self-reflection, and meet her not with power, but with openness.
Most will never choose this.
They will say “she’s too much,” “too intense,” “too complicated.”
What they mean is: she can’t be pacified.

And so, the system works.
Not by force.
But by calling this trap love.