Calm down, this is not a honey-dripping piece about cosmic fate and twin souls.
I am building a simple and direct psychological equation here. If love is an existential need, then you have to work at it.
Eating and drinking and obtaining light and warmth are existential needs, and you genuinely sit in traffic every morning and arrive at an office because you work at those.
To give love and to feel loved is probably the optimal mental state, and it also pays enormously — physically, psychologically and financially.
But love is a complex and deceptive project which disguises itself as something simple, and perhaps that is why too many people look in the wrong direction when they are searching for it.
When all along they should have been looking into themselves.
I am not talking about the well-known mental self-indulgence that goes by the name of awareness.
I am talking about genuine psychological efficiency. About a constant connection between what you understand and what you do. About a willingness to admit your defects with courage, and an even braver willingness to put in sweat and blood and honesty and sense in order to uproot those defects.
In fairness, you can live without love. You can live perfectly well, comfortably and pleasantly, for years without love.
On the other hand, you do not have to type on a computer. You could certainly still use a typewriter.
But why would you?
The point of the equation is not that love is compulsory. It is that people who treat it as a need do the work, and people who treat it as a stroke of fortune wait — and then explain their waiting as bad luck, or bad timing, or a shortage of decent people.
None of which is falsifiable, which is precisely why it is so comfortable.