Architecturally, the theological structure of romance is equally blasphemous as it is holy. A repeated attraction to emotional unavailability involves attending a church the body memorized the layout of, praying to a god who only ever hears but never responds. A god who demands you to kneel and offer and bleed without ever confirming if the efforts reached his good grace. The relationship cannot be criticized as broken since devotion to absence is the point. Your Sisyphean burden will never end because reaching was never revealed. To finally reach would collapse the entire architecture of your faith, a theological framework absorbed so early that it has become indistinguishable from desire itself.

Apart from omnipotence, godhood’s presence cannot be described except through negation; a presence that exceeds language with only a description of not as satisfactory. Apophatically, we reference god as “not a human”, “not mortal”, “not finite.” We circle the absence and hope the outline reveals more. But if this language is reserved for divinity yet we describe the occupancy and vacancy in our beds with which they are not, is a god not then created? By language alone, with every not cruel like my father or not emotionally stunned, we crawl into the pornographic negative of trauma, defined entirely by wounds they fail to replicate. The romantic object becomes god on earth, a mirror of the god embedded in an internal structure of belief. Because what is godhood if not omnipotence rendered incomprehensible?

In what we might generously assume as a "healthy" relationship, roles must oscillate fluidly. God and follower. Follower and god. One person must occupy omnipotence when the other cannot hold themselves together. You look to your partner, forfeit control, develop rituals and practices to navigate the world through their framework. Is that not worship? The voluntary surrender of agency in exchange for order, for the promise that someone else can hold what you cannot.

And when the relationship ends, when it is the visceral kind that alters the fundamental architecture of selfhood, the person does not simply lose someone they loved but undergoes a complete ontological rupture.

Was your god worshiped in the pews of a church, forcing you to return the body you loaned to Christ?

Was he worshiped on the carpet of a mosque, buried with bruised knees waiting for judgment?

Do you get another chance to repeat your mistake by the graciousness of Buddha?

Like a god does, they withdraw from creation, rewriting the entire structure of existence through the violence of absence, rendering the world that contained them as incoherent. The self that existed in relation to that person ceases to be, and what remains is a stranger wearing your name, moving through your routines, occupying your body but fundamentally unrecognizable. Despite knowing, despite surviving, people continue to search for someone who will love them for the rest of their lives, who will hold their flaws and failures without flinching, replicating the exact theological model they worship. God, despite your unworthiness, will accept you unconditionally. Humans seek the impossible demand that something beyond the self, something elevated to the status of the divine, remains constant, even as the self dissolves and reconstitutes and dissolves again in an endless cycle of becoming that allows no fixed point of reference.

The failure is not in making this demand for omnipotence from flesh, though the demand is unreasonable by any rational measure. The failure is in believing that this demand originates from within you, that it is a personal failing or individual pathology rather than a structural inheritance, a script written by forces we only retroactively name as unthought knowns because we absorbed them before we had language sophisticated enough to refuse them, before we understood that theology was being embedded into our nervous systems disguised as love.

Christianity argues for a birth into sin and salvation through Christ. You are broken and someone else must rescue you.Theology leaps out of scripture and seeps into every nerve of your body. An individual raised under Christianity therefore is more likely to arrive at romance waiting to be saved, expecting the romantic object to redeem what is fallen. The partner becomes Christ. But the inescapable need to atone comes with the ability to use sin as a crutch, a theological permission that abdicates responsibility. And when the object inevitably fails to perform the miracle of wholeness, it is experienced as a subconscious betrayal of a divine contract. In this model, the partnership becomes a mutual crucifixion in the devout journey of shared destruction.

Reflexively, Islam builds differently since the word itself means to submit. Accountable, you do not have the luxury of rescue since voluntary surrender is to something larger than the relationship itself. Though the partner cannot be the savior but a witness to submission, a god is produced anatomically since it results in either profound independence or profound control. If the partner's behavior reflects on your standing before God, then their actions must be managed as if you are god. A romance brought out of theological necessity with intimacy that becomes surveillance.

Since every theology produces a different sexual architecture, every god also shapes how to touch and to be touched differently. You kneel Catholically until the position becomes a sexual preference. If divinity is above and lowering yourself allows you to access it, this neuromuscular reference is practiced into flesh until it becomes a pathway to reward. Sexual submissiveness becomes trained within since the person has become attuned to lowering. When sex arrives, the body assumes an automatic submissiveness. And when an attempt to reverse the dynamic is carried, the body freezes. How can you receive worship if you were only taught to offer it?

But a claim to rewrite your repeated story requires recognizing that the script even exists. But most people do not have this recognition, with the experience of patterns labeled as personal failures rather than inherited liturgies in a broader theological condition. It is almost insidious in which a religious apparatus that was never rooted in the theology itself finds its roots within. And because romance does not exist in isolation, the presence of God then stretches out into a wider religious infrastructure. When someone turns to their friends for romantic advice, support is sought out like consulting a saint. Friends become intermediaries who pray on their behalf, validate their suffering, and even absolving them of their guilt. They only hear one side, only see the partner through an image that may bear no resemblance to the actual object. But since judgment is internalized, the object becomes a distorted reflection of the devil the saints have declared them to be. Prophets made of romantic theorists and writers are decoded till scripture, authoritative texts dictating the health, longevity, and indication of compatibility. It is easier to ask for permission to feel than to feel, applied like doctrine by a possessive priest. The person is no longer in a relationship but follows an entire religion with the partner as the idol in the center, a place for the object around which the religion organizes itself. The religious comparison is not metaphorical. Religion started with god and god's message, but it became a place for hierarchies, rituals, and stakeholders who benefit from the opiate of masses. Every religion hits a point in time that leaves the god that started it and replaces it with man. It is easier to worship God when he is in your bed than god in the heavens.

One must also question the capacity of the divine since abuse, after all, finds its root in abnormal use. Push people past their capacity and demand physical, emotional, and mental provision in an active engagement of extraction. Desiring abnormal access beyond the limits of what a human can sustain is abusive. But gods have infinite capacity; you can call upon god any time, speak to god constantly, demand god's attention without concern for whether god is tired, whether god needs rest or whether god has limits. If the divine is always available, always listening, always capable, we are able to absolve ourselves to his hands to hold everything that we cannot.

You cannot abuse god.

But if a partner is treated divinely, then thus the partner must always be available. Must hold everything without breaking, without boundaries, without the inconvenient limitations of being human.

There is a romance in the exception. Someone who never wanted kids suddenly wants them when the right person appears. Someone who never compromised their routine becomes flexible. Positions held for years dissolve in a single conversation because the idea of loss is unbearable enough to rewrite entire convictions. Is that not omnipotence? The person has the power to alter your reality, to make you question your own foundations, to reshape what you believed was fixed about yourself. Is that not the exact role of god? To rewrite the fundamental structure of your world just by existing in it? And it is terrifying precisely because it reveals how much agency you have forfeited, how willing you are to amputate parts of yourself just to remain in proximity to divinity. Since every moment that has happened and will happen already exists simultaneously in this universe, time is not a line but a field where our consciousness moves through it in observation to create the illusion of sequence. Which means the person you love now has already broken your heart now. They no longer exist now while they exist now. The betrayal is happening in the same moment as the intimacy is. You are in love and abandoned simultaneously because time does not separate these states; only awareness does. And if awareness is the only mechanism of creating distinction, then the partner exists in a state of permanent omnipresence. Always there. Never there. Already gone while still holding you.

Man will always create a god. And in the absence of traditional religion, romance becomes the opiate as recognition that under secularism, under the slow erosion of metaphysical certainty, people still need something to orient toward. Romances offer the structure of worship without requiring belief in the invisible. The partner is tangible. The devotion is visible. The illusion of mutual suffering is real.

Which god have you chosen to serve?