Amazon asks: Should I stop looking for love?

Good Paul says:

No.

Bad Paul says:

I’m assuming that you…

Good Paul says:

Wait, wait, I wasn’t done.

You haven’t given a lot of detail, Amazon, so I am making some guesses and assumptions here, and if what I say doesn’t actually apply to you I hope you’ll forgive me. But I know that there are plenty of people who do fall into the situation I’m assuming for you.

It hurts to hope and be disappointed, especially again and again. Rejection is painful, even passive rejection. I can deeply empathize with wanting to avoid being hurt again. And you can’t be rejected if you aren’t asking for anything. Giving up looking for love makes a lot of sense.

We see love portrayed in fiction all the time. It’s a little much, really. People in romance books, science fiction series, action movies, horror shows, are falling in love and pairing off constantly, and the story usually goes that you are incomplete and unfulfilled until you find your one true love, and there is someone out there for everybody.

I do not believe that there is someone out there for everyone.

And I don’t mean that as a discouragement, but just the opposite. It’s a big world, and it’s full of people—people who are always changing and growing, and not one of those people is exactly who you think they are or exactly what you expect of them. There is not someone out there for everyone; there are 7.8 billion people out there, and many of them are people you could find love with.

But you can find happiness without finding love, and there’s nothing that says you have to find love at all. Every person does not need to find a romantic partner in order to be fulfilled and complete and worthwhile.

Love doesn’t complete you; not in the way that we see it in fiction, because you are not incomplete. The cliché goes wherever you go, there you are. That refers to travel, and metaphorically to other external changes, and a romantic partner is an external change. You are a full and complete person, and your griefs, sadnesses, frustrations, disappointments, and even loneliness are all elements of that full and complete person. A romantic partner cannot fulfill you, not really and not forever, because you will always bring yourself into that relationship.

But that said, the reality that you bring yourself into every experience you have does not mean you shouldn’t seek good, happy, rewarding, satisfying, and nurturing experiences. Companionship is a human need, and although there are many way to find companionship, a romantic partner—someone who cares about you, listens to you, seeks your happiness even above their own—really is lovely. And maybe better than all of that is the ability to be those things for someone else. Again I’m quoting clichés, but like the song goes “it’s so important to make someone happy … make just one someone happy, and you will be happy too”. I think that’s worth looking for.

In your question you asked “should I stop looking,” which makes me think that love is something you want. You have been looking. That suggests that if you stop, it’s not because you decided you don’t actually want it, but because you decided it doesn’t exist for you, or that the search is futile. That you will never find it, so you might as well give up. But I think you can certainly find someone who will love you and who you can love if that’s something you want, and more generally I doubt it’s actually possible to stop seeking happiness, as a human.

But in one sense I do think you should stop looking for love. Look for people, instead. Be curious about the people you encounter, and open to the ways that life and relationships develop and flourish and change and sometimes decay. If you are thinking of people as potential mechanisms to fulfill a pre-existing life role for you they are likely to be put-off, and you’re likely to miss out on the reality of the people around you. Look for love in a lower-pressure sense of looking for ways to be loving and kind to, and curious and enthusiastic about the people around you.

Keep looking, and I think you will find that, to finish my trifecta of clichés, love is all around.