Love is timeless. We humans have been talking about the feels that love gives us with the same vocabulary since we first came to express ourselves in a collection of sounds that others understood to be attached to that twisty, nervous, horny feeling a solid crush will put in your gut. The means by which we have come to communicate this feeling have changed, but the sentiment has not. Let’s envision for a moment that pre-modern man carved phalluses from wood to present to his beloved as a depiction of his own member—with some small embellishments, not unlike a particularly heroic angle on a modern-day dick pic.

Falling in love, hopelessly, squishily in love, is an experience that we have learned from poetry and paintings and Romeo & Juliet and Beyonce and Jay-Z (Lemonade notwithstanding) and early 2000s Matthew McConaughey movies is special; it’s intoxicating and wonderful and they would have you believe you haven’t fully lived until you’ve experienced it.

So why are love songs always sad, desperate missives of thinly veiled insanity? Most “love” songs are rife with jealousy, insecurity, fear, disappointment, control, and obsession. Think of your worst relationship ever. Now put it to music. That’s the formula for a classic love song.

Let’s look at some examples, shall we?

There is the well-documented creepiness of the Police song Every Breath You Take that is ostensibly about the attentive devotion of a man to his girlfriend, but really it should be written in letters clipped from magazines, such is its stalky vibe. And as much as I love Bill Withers, you can’t listen to Ain’t No Sunshine without thinking to yourself that the guy should really stop being such a sour puss just because his girl went out for awhile, probably to take a break from the obsessive sap. Similarly, one of my personal favorite songs is Aretha Franklin’s Say a Little Prayer, a sweet and lilting tune that is essentially about a woman so preoccupied with her boyfriend that every moment of her day is infected by thoughts of him, and buried shallowly beneath that preoccupation is the fear he’ll leave her. And let’s not forget Captain & Tennille’s timeless song Love Will Keep Us Together with heartwarming lines like: “Whatever / Young and beautiful / But someday your looks will be gone / When the others turn you off / Who'll be turning you on?” Translation: You're trapped! Then this entry from Incubus from I Miss You: “I see your picture, I smell your skin on the empty pillow next to mine / You have only been gone ten days, but already I’m wasting away.” Yay, love!

They say love makes you crazy. And indeed, popular love songs essentially are the musical score to sociopathic behavior.

Then there’s just the complete remove from any kind of reality. Take Everlasting Light by the Black Keys. For the record, this is one of my very favorite songs ever. But it’s a bit grandiose, right? With lines like “Love is the coal / that makes this train roll” and “Dark days are over / loneliness is through,” well, there is admittedly a nice sentiment there, but we all know that’s not how it really works out. Dark days still abound whether you’re single or not and any functional and happy relationship needs more than love to keep it rolling. And the timeless Bryan Adams song, Everything I Do is another plum example of overpromise, under deliver, and gross exaggeration. In all seriousness, I hope to never have a boyfriend who would do everything for me. Kind of oppressive and paternalistic, no? Get a life, dude.

Popular music and a host of other media—sit coms, rom-coms, romance novels—have shaped endlessly unreasonable and unrealistic expectations about love, and we've all fallen for it at one point or another, some of us more than others. But every relationship I’ve had, the good and the bad alike, has only illustrated the fatuousness of popular music on the subject.

It’s no wonder there’s a growing army of single people who have either written off the notions of romantic relationships or have reinvented the ideas around what constitutes a relationship—though those experiments are also fraught, if I’m to believe what my polyamorist friends tell me. Maybe instead we just avoid the whole messy business, maintain our composure and our dignity and listen to, and write, better love songs.

To that end, I’ve created a Spotify playlist of somewhat realistic and non-creepy love songs. These are songs that acknowledge the way falling in love will make you feel, but treat it with some hard-learned suspicion. Or they're songs that manage to celebrate love while still being grounded in reality about it. Or they're just songs about sex. Tell me what songs I missed. There's definitely more out there.