reason: it was extremely hard to meet anyone  acceptable - and everyone knew it. There were only  

a few people in the village, travel was expensive  and social occasions few and far between. 

This had many drawbacks: it encouraged  people to accept offers from suitors they were  

unconvinced by, it meant that characters  who would have delighted each other  

died lonely and unfulfilled because there  were a few mountains or a river between them. 

Our technologists have used their  genius to correct these historic obstacles  

and provide us with unending choice. Meeting  someone new is now a constant possibility.  

But this breakthrough at the level of introduction  has obscured an ongoing challenge at the level of  

ultimate purpose: we may have become easier  to meet, but we are not any easier to love.  

We remain - each one of us - highly  challenging propositions for anyone to take on.  

All of us are riddled with psychological quirks  that serve to render an ongoing relationship  

extremely problematic: we are impatient,  prone to making unjust accusations,  

rife with self-pity, and unused to expressing  our needs in a way they can be understood  

by others - just to start the list… That we can meet so many people  

has beautifully obscured our ugly sides, breeding  in us the charming yet misleading idea - which  

engulfs us any time we hit difficulties - that  we are in trouble because we have not until now  

met ‘the right person.’ The reason why there  is friction and longing has, we tell ourselves,  

nothing to do with certain stubborn infelicities  in our own natures or paradoxes in the human  

condition as a whole, it is only a matter of  needing to hunt further for a more reasonable  

candidate who will, at last, see things our way. The promise of choice has drained us of the  

patience and modesty necessary to grapple with  the tensions that are prone to come our way  

whomever we might be with. We forget that almost  everyone is a charming prospect so long as we know  

nothing about them. Part of what it takes to be  ready for love is to imagine the difficulties that  

we cannot, as yet, know too much about in detail;  the bad moods that will lurk behind the energetic  

smiles, the difficult pasts that lie beneath the  lustrous eyes, the tangled psyches that reside  

beneath a stated love of camping and the outdoors. Even though there are hundreds of other people  

we might meet, there are not - in truth  - so many people we could really love.  

Dating apps may have made it  infinitely easier to connect  

but they haven’t helped us in any way to be more  patient, imaginative, forgiving or empathetic,  

that is, any more adept at the arts that  make any one relationship viable. Most of  

the issues we experience with a given candidate  will therefore show up, in comparable guises,  

with almost anyone we might stumble upon. The real work we should be doing  

isn’t - once we have had a reasonable look  around - to keep trying to meet new people;  

it’s to get to the root of what makes it hard to  live with any one person we could alight upon. 

We will be ready for love when we surrender  some of our excited sense of possibility and  

recognise that though we might have many choices,  we don’t - in reality - have so many options.  

It may sound dark, but this will, in its  own way, be a liberating realisation that  

can help us redirect our energies away from  the exhausting circuit of new encounters  

towards a search for the kind of mutual emotional  maturity on which true love can one day be built.