ow are we supposed to find love? For me, as for many people, this felt like a fraught question when I was single. Love is not like a lost object, after all: We can't locate it by retracing our steps or thoroughly searching our surroundings. But it is also not like the solution to a problem; we may think about it for a very long time, we may imagine it in vivid detail, but we will never find it inside our own mind. It is something like a missing person — in fact, it is quite literally a missing person — but the search area in which we must look for it is essentially unbounded. It could be waiting at the local coffee shop, or three states away, or on staff at a hospital in Senegal, or at a holiday party you're not very enthusiastic about attending 40 cold, rainy blocks from home. To make matters worse, in the majority
