“On relationships”,
All relationships, especially those involving love, have either
⠀a) a transactional and/or obligatory aspect; or
⠀b) ARE inandof themselves transactional and/or obligatory.
Take a celebrity interacting with their fanbase, for example. Maybe they’re an actor. The fanbase doesn’t love that person intrinsically; parasocial relationships never can. They can only love something that the celebrity has expressed, e.g. their acting skills, their personality, their writing style, their entrepreneurship, their charity, their advocacy, their intelligence, their thought process as distilled and expressed for an external viewership, etc. It is impossible to love someone intrinsically, as a person cannot fully express who they are for an external viewership; there is always some distilling involved. “I love X person” is really just cultural and linguistic shorthand for "I love the ideal/archetypal person that X believes themself or that I believe themself to be". This is why, for example, when someone you like denigrates their ability, you feel the strong need to correct them and reassure them that they are great at what they do: because their constructed view of X is not the same as your constructed view of X.
Note: This doesn't mean that someone can't genuinely appreciate someone else for who they have distilled themself or believe themself to be, and certainly doesn't mean that all relationships are fake; there is real appreciation for something being built atop it. But the foundation is one of these elements. ♦