Narrator: Imagine walking through a modern city and seeing advertisements that promise you can "Get love without chance!" or "Be in love without falling in love!" These aren't hypothetical slogans; they were part of a real ad campaign for the dating site Meetic. The campaign offered a seductive proposition: all the benefits of love with none of the risk, none of the suffering, and none of the terrifying vulnerability of a chance encounter. It presented love as a safe, pre-vetted consumer product, much like a military campaign promising a "zero dead" war—a clean, technological solution that erases the messy, unpredictable, and human cost of the endeavor. But what if this quest for safety is the very thing that threatens to destroy love itself?

In his profound and challenging book, In Praise of Love, philosopher Alain Badiou, in conversation with Nicolas Truong, argues that this safety-first mentality is one of the greatest dangers facing love today. He contends that love is not a contract for mutual benefit or a risk-free indulgence, but a radical, world-altering event that must be defended and reinvented.

Narrator: Badiou begins by identifying a central threat to modern love: the obsession with security. He sees this manifested most clearly in the logic of online dating sites, which he critiques through the example of the Meetic ad campaign. The site's promise of "love without chance" is, for Badiou, a deeply troubling proposition. It attempts to eliminate the very element that makes love a profound human experience: the encounter. A true encounter is an unpredictable event that disrupts one's life. By contrast, these platforms offer a pre-screened, algorithmically-matched partner, essentially an arranged marriage where the arrangement is based on personal security and preference rather than family duty. The goal is to avoid the "fall" in "falling in love," to get the prize without the existential risk.

Badiou draws a chilling parallel between this risk-averse approach to love and the American military's rhetoric of "zero dead" wars. The concept of using "smart" bombs to conduct a war without casualties for the aggressor is a fantasy of total control that masks the very real violence and suffering inflicted on the other side. Similarly, the promise of "perfect love without suffering" is a fantasy that denies the inherent challenges, disagreements, and vulnerabilities that are part of any meaningful, long-term connection. Both "zero risk" love and "zero dead" wars are, in Badiou's view, symptoms of a culture that prioritizes safety and control over genuine, transformative experience.

Narrator: Philosophy has always had a complicated relationship with love. Badiou notes that philosophers often view love with suspicion, seeing it as a chaotic force that undermines reason. The classic theatrical trope of the wise, Stoic philosopher being completely undone by a beautiful woman illustrates this fear. Yet, Badiou insists, following Plato, that "anyone who doesn’t take love as a starting point will never understand the nature of philosophy." Love is not just a distraction; it is a fundamental condition for thought.

The 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard embodies this conflict perfectly. Kierkegaard courted a young woman named Régine Olsen, believing that their marriage would represent the highest "ethical" stage of existence—a genuine commitment endorsed by society and God. Yet, despite his deep affection for her, he found himself unable to reconcile his grand philosophical ideals with the practical reality of marriage. He ultimately broke off the engagement, a decision that haunted him for the rest of his life. Kierkegaard's story reveals the profound tension between theorizing about love and actually living it. For Badiou, this highlights a crucial point: love is not just an idea to be analyzed but an existential project to be undertaken. It is this gap that modern thinkers like Jacques Lacan address with the provocative claim that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship." By this, Lacan meant that sex itself is often a narcissistic act that doesn't truly bridge the gap between two individuals. Love, then, is what "fills the absence," allowing two people to move beyond themselves and experience the world from the perspective of the other.

Narrator: The Romantic tradition often portrays love as an all-consuming fusion, a moment of ecstatic connection that burns so brightly it cannot possibly last. The legend of Tristan and Isolde is the ultimate example. After accidentally drinking a love potion, their passion becomes an unstoppable force that defies all social duty and ultimately leads to their deaths. Their love is entirely consumed in the singular, miraculous moment of the encounter.

Badiou rejects this interpretation. For him, the encounter—the "chance" event that brings two people together—is only the beginning. Love is not the moment of meeting; it is the long, often difficult process that follows. He argues that "love isn't simply about two people meeting... it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two." This is a tenacious adventure, not a fleeting ecstasy. The story of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is not just about their instant connection at a feast. It is about their decision to build a world together in defiance of their families' hatred. Their love is an active construction against impossible odds. Badiou insists that real love is one that "triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world." It requires duration, effort, and the will to build a shared reality.

Narrator: If love is a construction, what exactly is it building? Badiou's answer is that love is a "truth procedure." This means it's a process through which a specific kind of truth is created—the truth of what it means to experience the world not as a solitary individual, but as Two. When two people fall in love, they begin to see the world not just from their own point of view, but from the perspective of their difference. This shared perspective creates a new reality.

The pivotal moment in this process is the declaration of love. The words "I love you" are not just an expression of feeling; they are a commitment. They take the random chance of the encounter and fix it into the beginning of a shared destiny. This is where fidelity becomes crucial. For Badiou, fidelity isn't just about not cheating; it's about a commitment to the construction, a loyalty to the "Two scene" and the truth it produces. It is the ongoing work of turning a chance event into something that endures.

This might sound abstract, but it finds its most powerful expression in the lived reality of lifelong commitment. Badiou cites a letter written by the philosopher André Gorz to his wife, Dorine, after 58 years together. As she was dying, he wrote: "You'll soon be eighty-two. You have shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh forty-five kilos yet you are as beautiful, gracious and desirable as ever... I love you more than ever." Their shared suicide shortly after is a tragic testament to a love that was a complete, lifelong construction. Gorz's letter proves that the declaration "I will always love you" is not a naive fantasy, but a promise that can be made real, inscribing a form of eternity within the finite span of a life.

Narrator: Badiou is careful to distinguish love from politics. He argues that a "politics of love" is a dangerous and meaningless idea, because politics is fundamentally about the collective and must, at times, define and struggle against an enemy. Love, by contrast, is about the Two, and its primary enemy is internal: selfishness, or the ego's preference for its own world over the shared world of the Two.

However, he does see a formal parallel. He describes love as a "minimal communism." In its ideal form, communism is a political system where the collective good prevails over private self-interest. Similarly, in love, the real subject is not the individual and their satisfaction, but the becoming of the couple. The focus shifts from "what's in it for me?" to "what can we build together?" This is beautifully illustrated in the comedies of Molière. His plays are almost always about young lovers who have met by chance, struggling against the "implacable law" of arranged marriages imposed by their parents. Their love is a small, rebellious community of two, fighting for the freedom to construct their own world against the established order. In this sense, every true love is a small-scale revolution, a declaration that a new world, built from the perspective of Two, is possible.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love is that love is not a feeling to be consumed but a truth to be constructed. It is an act of profound resistance in a world that increasingly pushes us toward safe, isolated individualism and risk-free transactions. Badiou argues that we must defend love from the threats of commodification and security-obsessed thinking, and have the courage to reinvent it as a tenacious, enduring adventure.

The book leaves us with a powerful challenge. It asks us to abandon the search for a perfect, pre-approved partner and instead embrace the radical uncertainty of the encounter. It calls on us to trust in difference, to have faith in the long, difficult, and beautiful work of building a world with another person. To love, in Badiou's words, is to "struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence." The question is, are we brave enough to begin that struggle?