The death drive, as conceived by Freud and elaborated upon by Lacan can paradoxically be considered as an integral part of the social bond, including the love relation. When considering romantic love, couples are bonded together via their shared ways of deriving enjoyment from missing the object of the drive; that, is, they bond over their shared – or complementary ways of suffering. At the same time, via the structure of extimacy and the repetition compulsions couples repeat instead of remember, many bonds of love – with their resulting complaints – are founded in the hainamoration of one's own jouissance. Finally, contrary to existentialist notions of freedom which depend upon the powers of consciousness, love aligned with the perpetual self-destruction at the heart of the drives can, in fact, be deployed to facilitate someone's freedom. Couples who take the risk of exposing their lack to one another can gain additional agency through seeing the Other as lacking and adopting a position of nonbelonging. Examples of such possibilities for freedom will be given via a consideration of a kind of love operative via the vicissitudes of the relationship between Connell and Marianne in Sally Rooney's 2018 novel Normal People.