Photo by Colin Maynard on Unsplash

“One day, you’ll wake up next to the love of your life, and when you see their face in the morning sunlight, you won’t be thinking about your current heartbreak or the pain of being single.”

“You will fall in love one day. It might happen later for you than it does for your friends, but you will fall in love and you will be loved in return and the waiting will be worth it.”

I often come across words like these while scrolling through social media, and I understand their purpose. It is a wonderful thing to be reminded that no matter how permanent our current emotions and circumstances seem, they are not doomed to last forever and any number of pleasant changes could occur in the future. There is only one problem with encouragement like this — it presents romantic love as a guarantee rather than a possibility.

We are born with unimaginable potential, but we are not promised to receive every piece of the conventional life we hope is meant for us. Love stories, marriage, and children are all things that may be ours one day if we desire them, and yet, they also may not.

On a dark night, when your room is empty and your hands are cold, it’s hard to wrestle with the fact that the person you’ve been imagining — the person who would make everything warmer and softer and easier to handle — might never come. But if you don’t take the time to acknowledge and wrestle with this idea, you may spend your life looking toward a hypothetical beautiful thing and miss out on the beautiful things scattered throughout the life you’re living right now. Or, you may fall into the wrong arms, believing that everyone has a person and you’ve waited long enough, so this must be your person, right?

I firmly believe, however, that there’s an aspect of hope in the midst of this difficult reality — just as our feelings and desires are no guarantee of a specific future, so too our fears and nightmares are no guarantee of a dreadful life. Your future is not limited to two possibilities — one in which all of your longings are met and one in which you’re miserable. Reality is complex and nuanced and it is possible to hold an ache in one hand and joy in the other.

It is possible to carry your loneliness like a stone in your pocket — to be aware of its presence and not let it stop you from holding on to other things. You can reach for something good while acknowledging that it might not erase the bad. You don’t have to keep yourself from contacting an old friend, or trying to make a new one, or learning an instrument, or reaching out to a therapist, all because you know those things are different from having a relationship and you’re scared they won’t help. Maybe they won’t — but what if they do? What if they make your journey unexpectedly easier?

You might not fall in love; you might find yourself on vacation with friends, wishing you had someone who was even closer to you than these incredible people you’ve chosen to make your life with. And all of the sights of the city that should fill you with gratitude instead leave you with an emptiness that can’t be answered, explained, or shaken.

But then, you return home and the comfort of the familiar sneaks up on you. You were expecting the quiet house to enhance your pain, but instead, you are filled with an appreciation for the place that is all yours, and though you’re hardly aware of it, something has begun to shift inside of you. The sun rises the next morning as it always does, yet it seems as if the light is a different hue, as if it is purer than it has ever been before, and it shines not just for your neighbours and friends but for you too.

A year later, and you’re walking the same roads you explored on that vacation where the emptiness overwhelmed you, but this time the emptiness is more of a memory than a present threat. Your friends laugh and it hits you; you can ask for a hug or a late night conversation with someone who loves you whenever you need it. You can listen to your favourite song, try a new meal, say a prayer, make up a dance, donate to charity, smell an old book, or write a letter, and all of these things that once seemed like activities your soul was too tired for now seem like wonderful additions to this life you didn’t plan for and are no longer sad to be living.

You might not fall in love, but you might fall in love with this life in which you haven’t fallen in love, in spite of how impossible it may seem right now. Tomorrow does not regard your impossibilities, and reality is so much richer, deeper, scarier, and lovelier than we can ever imagine it to be.