A couple of days ago I posted a link to a New York Times article on how single people are turning away from the dating industry to pursue other things in life, leaving romantic love to the fates. One reader commented by asking several compelling and complex questions about why people seek mates. While I don’t have a definitive answer, I would suggest that it is because the drive to be in relationship is part of what it means to be human, and culture, combined with advertising, becomes a straightjacket restricting how we perceive love, and what qualifies as a fulfilling expression of it.

I have a book in my queue, The Future of Love, that may offer some insight. I have included excerpts from the introduction in this post to provide a foretaste of the author’s premise. If it piques your interest, you might locate a copy and delve into the rest.

Excerpts from “A Renaissance of Love” by Daphne Rose Kingma:

Love is an energy, not a substance. … Love is mysterious and beautiful. It makes us happy, gives us hope, allows us to believe that the impossible can happen. And yet, it’s inexplicable. It can’t be defined or analyzed, catalogued or priced. Its premier property is that when it exists, it can never be mistaken for anything else, and nothing else, no matter how worthwhile or supposedly grand, can ever be passed off as love. …

It is older, wiser, finer, truer, sweeter, and more radiant than any human being. It is what makes us wise, fine, true, sweet, and radiant. It is the best — the essence of God — in us. And it is love, this exquisite energy, with which we connect when we first enter into the human experience we call “a relationship.” … It is this highly charged, buoyant, transcendant, delicious feeling, and the longing for more, for a lifetime of it, that propels us into relationships.

Relationships are the endless interplay of this vast energy of love and all that occurs in our daily human lives. Our desire to feel this love forever, to be in love always, to repeat and endlessly recapture this ecstatic luminous feeling day by day, year after year, with the person who first inspired it in us is not only why we “fall in love” but also why we choose “to have relationships.” It is also why, when our relationships go sour or grow threadbare, we reminisce about the way they once were. We want to reconnect with love. …

If all of this is true about love, and I believe it to be, then why are we so often disappointed in the love in our lives? Why does it so often seem to fail us and why is it so often a pitched battle? …

This book is about the breaking down of relationships as we have known them, the subsequent emergence of new forms of relatedness, and the future of love. It is about a journey we’re already taking. … Having been raised to regard marriage as the only honorable relationship, we woke up to discover that it was only one in a vast array of intimate connections. …

The truth is, we have all come from love, but our relationships have often been a detour from love. I believe that we were all together once, as a single, vast, pulsating luminous consciousness that was divided bit by bit, person by person, into the tiny, shining fragments that are our individual souls. Love is the river, each human being a droplet of water, and together, in spite of our fears and resistance, we are returning to love, melting and flowing toward home.

We’re all looking for more love. It’s that simple.