This is personal, but it is not a diary entry. It is about fighting the same systems I have always railed against: bureaucracy, Big Tech, anything that cages what is human. This is xodice.org, freedom, always.
She had a medical procedure. While nothing life threatening, it could have been life changing. The kind of thing that makes you sit in silence for a minute and realize how quickly the world disappears when someone you love hurts.
As I sat there, watching her recover, I could not shake the thought that our bond, real, messy, human, could be reduced to a checkbox on a form. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and her quiet breathing felt like the only real thing in that sterile room. I felt helpless, not because of her, but because the system could erase what we had with a form. Yet all I could imagine was some faceless clerk deciding our love needed a stamp to count. If anything had gone wrong, the system would not have asked who loved her most; it would have asked who was legally allowed to make a decision. That thought burned because it showed how deeply we have let bureaucracy define what love even is.
It is absurd to stand in line at a county office to prove you are in love. The same portal for car tags sells you a love certificate. Click here to confirm your commitment and do not forget the $68 filing fee. Congratulations, you are now officially recognized by the state.
A relationship used to be two people sharing a life. Now it is an IRS database entry.
I have been married before. I signed the forms, stood before a clerk, and watched my love reduced to a tax bracket. It felt like configuring a service that was supposed to “just work,” only to crash under the weight of lawyers and emotional fine print. I still see the clerk’s bored glance as we signed the marriage certificate, like we were just another transaction. When it ended, the divorce papers felt heavier than any vow, proof that no form could hold what we had lost.
Now I am with someone who makes me understand what the word real actually means. No legal wrapper. No approval process. Just two people who found something worth keeping. It is simple, which makes it the most suspicious thing in the modern world. Everything today demands a license, a contract, or a subscription. The moment something feels natural, you can be sure someone somewhere is figuring out how to meter it.
I get why people choose the official route. Legal marriage offers clarity and protection because hospitals and banks speak paperwork, not sentiment. But that is the problem: love should not need a translator to be respected. Even if paperwork still has its place, it should never be mistaken for proof of love itself.
This is not just about marriage. It is about how the entire system runs. Love became taxable. The internet became monetized. Even privacy got turned into a service plan. The world that promised decentralization built the biggest central authorities in history, and we handed them the keys with a smile.
Once you needed a priest to make it holy. Now you need a clerk to make it deductible. The same logic that turned marriage into bureaucracy turned the open web into a gated suburb patrolled by moderators and engagement metrics. It is not even malicious. It is just efficient. And efficiency always eats meaning.
We traded independence for convenience. We used to pull our own cables, host our own sites, and build our own worlds. Now everything is leased from someone else’s infrastructure. The web was supposed to be personal, weird, and human. Instead, it looks like a strip mall where everyone pays rent to the same three landlords. Scroll long enough and you will see the pattern: algorithms decide who we love, what we feel, and how long we feel it. The feed curates our lives until even authenticity has a monthly plan. Think of Instagram burying your friend’s raw, unfiltered post, a moment of real grief or joy, because it did not get enough likes fast enough. Or think of the blog you poured your soul into, now invisible because it did not play nice with SEO. Just like love, the web’s best moments get buried when they do not fit the system’s metrics.
And somehow, even love ended up behind their paywall. Something beautiful enough to exist on its own now needs a license, a database entry, and a nod from our digital overlords to make it “official.” Just as a clerk demands a license to make love official, Big Tech demands your data to make your voice heard. Both want control over what should be free. The idea that two people can simply choose each other without paperwork feels almost rebellious.
Somewhere, a database table is keeping score on who loves who, and I am sure it will sync to the cloud as soon as the Wi-Fi comes back.
When you start noticing the pattern, it is impossible to unsee it. I have spent years online preaching freedom from Big Tech’s grip, host your own site, own your voice. But sitting in that hospital, I saw it: the same system that cages the web was trying to cage our love. That is when it hit me. My fight for a free internet is the same as my fight for a free heart.
Every piece of modern life is built on the same flowchart: quantify, regulate, monetize. What cannot be measured is dismissed as inefficiency. What cannot be taxed is treated as a bug. The soul of the internet went missing the same way the soul of love did, quietly, with a polite form and a filing fee.
The fix is not revolution. It is refusal. Run your own mail. Host your own site. Build your own life. Start small. Write a letter, share a story, love someone fiercely, and let the system catch up later. For us, it is stolen moments over coffee, words unspoken but felt, building a life that does not need a form. Online, it is a blog no algorithm can bury, a space carved out for what is real. Love someone without asking for permission.
They can keep their licenses. I will take the risk of being unlicensed, unregistered, and unapproved. When I sit beside her, with no contracts, no forms, no signatures, it is the one corner of this world still running free.