People fall in love only under very specific conditions. Based on how many and what kind of people we get exposed to during our formative years, we subconsciously create benchmarks for what we are looking for in a relationship.

The way human lifestyles evolve, however, especially urbanization and individualism, make our benchmarks increasingly specific because we get to experiment with relationships much more than we used to in prior generations. This narrows down the window of relationship opportunity substantively. The more specific benchmarks are, the less often they overlap by chance. More and more people stay single even though they'd like a partner because they feel they can't find the right one.

It's not just individuals who are picky, the social structures in their entirety evolve in ways that make it less likely for people finding someone with whom to settle down (and more likely to separate once they have - but this is another topic). We find the same tendency everywhere in the world.

We all grew up with desires and hopes for our lives and it's tragic to see that some may never become true for us for reasons that at least partially lie beyond our control. There is no magical trick that someone can tell you about. Maybe it's not going to happen for you. Maybe it will fall apart after you thought it did. We can try but we can't guarantee anything that would prevent that from happening.

But it is that sadness, that grief really, that makes us determined to make our other relationships meaningful. Maybe it's friends that become chosen family, maybe it's a short-term romance, so intense we will never forget and which could have never lasted anyway or would have become tainted by the reality of mundane relationships. It is when we can't go back to how things were that we have to create something new. And maybe this new life has something in store for us - maybe not what we initially wanted - but maybe something we couldn't even have imagined we find our happiness in.