Love is best described as an ever-changing roller coaster of emotions. One minute, you’re at the top of the world, and then, in the blink of an eye, the world falls out from beneath you. You’ve touched heaven and scraped rock bottom. You’ve been the most confident one in the room, but you have also been the one who couldn’t even gather the courage to go in the first place.

Love is not a one-size-fits-all situation. It ebbs and flows uncontrollably, and just as we cannot control the tides, we cannot always control our love. The good is almost inevitably followed by the bad and vice versa. Some days, you will be blissfully unaware of the hurt lurking around the corner. You will be blasting your favorite song and thinking about the beautiful future the two of you are going to build together. And then, it happens.

Sometimes, it’s a slow process, where the fire inside you burns down to only a flicker. The love songs no longer make sense, and you are doing your best to carry on as you blast ballads about infidelity and hopelessness to help you make sense of the world that has slowly begun to crumble all around you. Other times, everything is ripped away from you, and your world goes black. We do not always get a goodbye, and no amount of searching through the lyrics of your favorite love song can help you figure out the exact moment that it all went wrong.

That’s the thing about love. It will always have its moments where it all goes wrong. Even the happiest couples are capable of having bad days. It can become so easy to make one bad day the rest of your life. You can choose to play the saddest song over and over again until it seems like your tears are falling in beat to the rhythm surrounding you in a comfortable hurt, or you can pull yourself back out of your pain. There is always hope to be found at the other side of your pain, you just have to give yourself the chance to find it.

Understanding the unpredictability of love is key to finding a love you feel comfortable making a home in. There wouldn’t be songs about both the highest highs and the lowest lows if we were not meant to experience them all. There will be days when you listen to music that uplifts you, and then there will be days when you listen to the words you are too afraid to say out loud. All of these ups and downs are necessary in this wild ride we call life. If you are only expecting your love to be a fairytale, then you will only be hurting yourself when your picture-perfect world shatters (and trust me, at some point, we all have to shatter). The day that you understand that today your heart might be broken, but tomorrow you might meet the love of your life is the day you are finally ready to accept the love that someone has been waiting to give to you.

The good and the bad parts of our lives and relationships are what make us whole. Nobody is perfect, and no one is expecting you to be. Stay single until you truly understand this fact. Enjoy the anthems and the ballads and let yourself be happy, even on the days when the happiness wants to hide.

There is a reason we have more than one love song to listen to. Let yourself be, and the love you have been dreaming of will find you at just the right moment, just like the perfect song always seems to play just when you need it.