TRANSACTIONAL LOVE: Why We Call Arrangements “Love”

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Love no longer means what it once did.Over time, it ceased to be merely a social alliance, destiny, or duty, and became a subjective experience, a source of meaning, emotional validation, and a promise of wholeness.

The problem is that the word remained the same, while its functions kept changing.

Still from the film Anora showing the female protagonist in an intimate moment that suggests emotional closeness and vulnerability, contrasted with the underlying asymmetry of the relationship. The image visually conveys the illusion of romantic elevation and being “chosen,” while subtly hinting at the transactional structure beneath the bond, where affection exists but is sustained by fantasy rather than mutual recognition or genuine encounter. — Anora, Ganhador do Oscar em 2025

In contemporary confusion, we also call love relationships organized around exchange, use, security, emotional regulation, or status. Moral discourse tries to separate “true love” from interest; economic discourse reduces everything to negotiation. Both impoverish the phenomenon of love.

What matters clinically is not defending love from some supposed corruption, but differentiating subjective positions. Not every relationship is romantic love, and not every transaction is pathological. Suffering begins when functional pacts are lived as ideals, and when the use of the other must be denied for the relationship to hold.

Transactional love: affective promise in the service of an arrangement

Transactional love does not, in fact, promise stability, care, or recognition. What it promises is illusion: the fantasy that a functional arrangement can turn into ideal love. It is this promise (often unspoken, but acted out) that sustains the bond between people who are in a specific position from which they think about life (described below).

This is not a clear pact between two subjects who are fully affectively open. It is an asymmetrical agreement sustained by shared fantasy. The language of love enters to conceal the nature of the arrangement and allow it to be lived as exception, destiny, or salvation.

In Anora, this appears with clarity. She is not deceived only by the other, but by the image of love that takes shape: being chosen, elevated, removed from the position of a functional object to that of a unique woman. Affect exists, but at its core the relationship is a kind of “playing at being.”

Frustration emerges when reality breaks the promise — not because there was necessarily conscious malice (though there are cases in which there is), but because reality proves stronger than the structure of the bond. Clinically, transactional love becomes pathogenic when the illusion must be maintained at any cost, even against lived experience.

The arrangements that sustain the empty idea of love

Transactional love is organized around specific arrangements that are not random, but psychic and social responses to concrete impasses:

Status: the other functions as symbolic access to a desired social position. To love is to be seen.
Power: the bond organizes hierarchy, control, and asymmetry. The relationship sustains a sense of dominance or exception.
Survival: the tie responds to material needs, protection, or minimal stability. Love appears as a later justification.
Image: being with someone serves to compose a narrative of value, success, or normality.
Proving worth: the other is summoned as a narcissistic witness; being chosen confirms existence.
Proving sexuality: the bond (or multiple bonds) guarantees sexual identity or potency more than genuine erotic exchange.

In these cases, affect may exist, but it does not organize the bond. It is subordinated to the function of the practical arrangement.

The people involved in practical arrangements

Transactional love tends to involve people who have not gone through the experience of love as spontaneous encounter, or who do not believe such an experience is real. As a result, they lack the psychic repertoire to sustain it. This is not a moral failure, but an emotional history.

The logic shifts from living the bond to buying a place: a space, a title, a relational identity. Love becomes a means, not an experience.

Some positions appear more frequently:

Normopathic functioning: adapted to norms, but impoverished in emotional life.
Schizoid positions: proximity is experienced as intrusion, and function protects psychic integrity.
Controlling profiles: the other must be reduced to predictability to avoid contact with dependence, loss, shame, and so on.
Excessively practical people: for whom emotions are abstractions, dangerous, or unreliable.

What they share is difficulty sustaining indeterminacy, vulnerability, and alterity — central elements of love as a living experience.

The experience of emotional love

Love is not a product, so it cannot be measured in terms of an “ideal narrative,” right or wrong. To love is simply to love. When the experience of liking, attraction, and loving encounters no practical, moral, or imagistic obstacles, love is simply a state of well-being, a goodwill toward the other — without payments or returns.

Love ceases to be transactional when the other is no longer summoned to sustain an arrangement, an image, or a proof of worth, and is instead encountered as a separate, unpredictable, uncontrollable subject. This requires psychic repertoire, tolerance of frustration, and contact with one’s own dependence.

While love functions as an illusory promise, it organizes fragile pacts sustained by fantasy and fear of abandonment. When that promise collapses, the bond breaks or becomes pathogenic, not because love failed, but because it was never the axis of the relationship.

In clinical work, the task is not to teach people how to love, nor to condemn transactions. It is to make it possible for the subject to recognize from where they love, so that, if they wish, they can leave the position of purchase, proof, or survival and risk ( perhaps for the first time) the experience of genuine encounter.