Why is real love so hard to find? Look into a mirror for the culprit

I had a dream last night about a woman who ran away from me. The more I think about it today, the more I think about a question that a reader sent me last week. She’s heartbroken about something right now and she wrote to ask, “Why is it so hard to find true love?”

Why are so many of us alone? Why are we looking for love?

In my dream, I saw a woman who I wanted to talk with. I somehow knew that I’d love her. How? I don’t know; it was a dream. We were both leaving a grocery store and she was ahead of me. As I sped up slightly to overtake her so I could speak, I noticed that she had lost one of her legs and walked with a prosthetic leg.

As we walked through the parking lot, she sped up when she realized I had picked up my pace behind her. I sped up further, but she started running as well as she could run on a prosthetic leg. Before I could get anywhere close to her, she was gone. She had run away because she saw me as a danger — when all I had in mind was the possibility of getting to know her. Maybe loving her.

I got into my car and drove very fast and very recklessly through the parking lot. I have no idea why. I almost hit a couple of people. It wasn’t anger, but I seemed to have a desperate need to — I don’t know — find something. Anything. It didn’t make rational sense. As the dream ended, I was close to wrecking the car and possibly hurting someone in another car because I didn’t know how to get my foot to the brake.

Somehow, I knew that I was doing this because the woman had run away and there was something self-destructive about me because of that.

I had thought a lot about the reader’s question last week. Why is it so hard to find true love? It’s something that almost all of us claim to want. There are plenty of people to pair off with. Shouldn’t it be easier than it is? Why is love such the source of heartbreak that it is?

Logically, I came up with a few factors that make it hard. I didn’t really think of it in a systematic way, but here are a few of the factors that came to me:

• Human beings are maddeningly different — and we tend to want someone who is just like us. It’s true that we don’t want someone who has the same faults we do, but we do tend to want someone with the same beliefs, experiences and understanding of the world. This can limit our choices culturally, intellectually, emotionally and in other ways. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing — because I do want a woman who shares my view of love, family, theology and the world. There’s nothing wrong with it, but for some of us, that eliminates a huge percentage of the world.

• We want someone who is perfect. We never say that and we rarely admit it to ourselves, but on some level, we want to believe that there is a perfect person who will happen to love imperfect us just as we are. Experience teaches us that it doesn’t work that way, so we start adjusting our view to accept more and more faults in others, trying to figure out which faults are deal-breakers and which are just frustrating or can be ignored entirely.

• We are too concerned about what other people think. This one can be huge. We have a certain picture in our minds about what love is acceptable for us. From parents, preachers, teachers, friends and the popular culture, we decide what age, color, background and so forth are right for us. So we frequently limit what we will accept based on what other people think, not realizing that a certain idea of what’s acceptable came from someone else — and we’re not obligated to accept it.

• Our priorities are wrong and we are unwilling to make tradeoffs for love. There are sometimes costs to having the love we need. We might have to give up an inheritance if our family doesn’t approve. We might have to give up social status if we love someone who others don’t consider acceptable. We might have to work harder (or in different ways) if we choose a partner who doesn’t have as much money as we’d like. There are all sorts of tradeoffs. If you want a certain love and you turn it down because you don’t want to give up something else in your life, you’re showing what your values are. If you turn down love in order to have money or power or position or approval, it’s because you value those things more highly than you value being loved.

• We are afraid of the things we want because we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve them. When we run away from things in life, we almost always have reasons why we did it. In many cases, those are just excuses, though. There was a time nearly a decade ago when I ran away from someone who dearly loved me and planned to marry me. At the time, I convinced myself I was doing the rational thing. I could give you a clear-eyed explanation of why I was running away then, but from this perspective — well after it’s too late to do anything about it — I know that I ran because I was terrified of being loved. I was terrified that I didn’t deserve love and that I would disappoint her. I had to find an excuse to run, so I did.

• We are afraid to let other people really see us, because we are scared of judgment and rejection. Because most people believe what we project — not what’s hidden inside — those people don’t consider us as potential matches for them. I’ve seen cases in which two people knew each other for years, but because each was hiding behind a mask, it took them years to realize that they were perfect matches for each other. The saddest cases are the ones in which the masks never come off and people remain lonely.

Those were the rational factors I thought of about why real love is so hard to find, but as I think about my list — and think about my dream — I find myself suspecting the root reason is even simpler.

Love isn’t hard to find. I found my first love because a girl spoke to me in the hallway of my junior high school when we were in the eighth grade, even though we didn’t start dating for eight years. I once found love on a random website where most people were looking for quick sex and casual conversation, because both of us were curious about a strange website but were looking for something emotionally deep. I once found love because a friend wrote to me to say that she had gotten some email from someone at work from a guy with my name — and she wanted to make sure it wasn’t me.

Love shows up at random times and in random places. It’s not hard to find. But we almost always find excuses to push it away.

So if you want to know why love is hard to find, I’d reframe the question a bit. I’d ask why we are so determined at times to accept the things that aren’t good for us — things that continue the dysfunctional patterns that we’re accustomed to — when opportunities for real love keep offering themselves — and we ignore them.

Love is available to us, but we’re our own worst enemies. We sabotage ourselves. We ignore the potential love that we’re afraid of. We choose love that comes with red flags attached (and ignore those red flags). We look to others for approval. We value other things more highly than love.

And we run away from what we most need and want.

I think I know why I dreamed about the woman running last night, but I think the lesson applies to most of us. Maybe all of us. There are people in life who are willing to love us — who find what’s inside us to be deeply attractive and want to give us the love and understanding we need.

But we have to accept it. We have to quit running away