It feels so far away. Physically, yes. But more so emotionally. Because in addition to going through the awfulness that is putting yourself out there and worrying about getting rejected and panicking when there’s two seconds of silence in your conversation during a dinner date, you still have to fall in love after you do all that stuff.
You have to go through all of those awkward single experiences in order to find your person. But once you find your person, you don’t fall in love immediately. You might even have to go through several different “persons” before you find the one that is actually your person. And once you’re finally, actually sure, you still have to fall in love with them.
It’s days and weeks and months and years of talking and learning about each other and picking out the funny quirks they have that you like. You tell them things and they tell you things. You trust each other and depend on each other and need each other. And then, eventually, finally, you think you’re in love.
Love at first sight isn’t a thing. There’s desire, and attraction, and intrigue. Those are all perfectly okay and exciting. But you can’t be in love with someone after a day. You can be in love with the idea of them, with the possibility of them, but not with them and them alone.
You are not in love with someone until they are driving you crazy and doing things that annoy you and showing you their weaknesses but you’re still not running away. Love takes a long time. True, honest, genuine love needs room to flourish and build its roots and gain stable footing.
That’s why it can be exhausting to merely think about falling in love with someone. You don’t even know them yet. You don’t know their name or who they are or anything about them. You have to find them, and then once you find them, you have to really fall in love with them.
That seems like it’s forever away. Like it’s never going to come. Like you’re just going to be in this repetitive experience of waking up alone and going to sleep alone while everyone else around you is being paired off.
When you do this for long enough, you start to honestly believe that maybe you aren’t going to fall in love. Maybe it will just never happen to you. You start to let the hope seep out of you, like a balloon with a tiny hole. Before you even realize it, you’re walking around with a giant blockade in front of you. Nobody approaches you, nothing with any hint of romance approaches you – because no one understands that you’re looking for it.
It’s not some rule of the universe, or some line from a romantic comedy – it’s just the truth. You have to believe you’re going to fall in love, and you have to believe it most strongly of all at the point where you feel it the least. When you don’t, you’re different, without even realizing it, physically and emotionally and mentally. Your eyes are cast down, instead of looking curiously at everyone around you. Your shoulders are slumped, because you’re thinking What’s the point? Your smile is hanging on by a thread, if it’s even there at all.
What you’re thinking in your mind and feeling inside your veins is exactly what’s evident on your outward appearance. The minute you close off internally is the moment that the open vibes you were putting out close off too.
It’s impossible and ridiculous and annoying, but when you’re at your most vulnerable point of believing you’re going to be alone forever is the point where you have to tell yourself that you won’t be. You have to learn to trust yourself, enjoy yourself, be happy with yourself. You have to learn that you can be okay when you’re alone, you can be happy even when you think that maybe love is not in the cards for you.
No one can ever promise you that love will definitely come for you. There’s no way of knowing. Maybe, for some reason, it will not come. But if you want to try, with everything you’ve got, you have to believe that it will come.
Once you can do that, once you can smile to yourself and put your light back out there, love will come. Maybe immediately, maybe in a few years, maybe in twenty, maybe never. Maybe, for a long time or forever, love will just come from your friends and your family. You just have to believe it will come, in one way or another, no matter what. 
