Ditto

The stories are always chance meetings: they shopped at the same store, they discovered they lived in the same building, they happened to sit next to each other on a city bus.

I thought about the odds of those chance meetings turning into meaningful relationships. The intersection of their lives alone is miraculous, when you consider that there are 8 million people in New York City. But the intersection itself is just a precondition that makes the real miracle possible. The real miracle is reciprocity. The fact that one person on that one day thought, hey, I like you, and the other, astoundingly, was thinking the same.

There is plenty of evidence that it happens. Every couple walking down the sidewalk is proof that the improbable happens every day. But when you analyze the odds, it seems astonishing that love happens at all, considering how many factors need to line up perfectly for two people to mutually choose one another.

I remember sitting on beach towels at the pool with my friends at sixteen, our long hair wet, our skin warm from the sun, and everything smelling of chlorine and sunshine. You could smell hamburgers cooking at the little food stand around the corner. Everything felt like pure relaxed happiness and endless possibilities. We lay on our damp towels and soaked up the warmth, and talked about friends, boys, and our futures: the careers we would have, where we would live, how many kids we would have.

Love was something we took for granted. It was a given. But as it turns out, it is the one thing that cannot be willed. So much can be accomplished unilaterally. We can learn a language, play an instrument, buy a home, learn to ski or ride a horse. We can become proficient simply by applying ourselves.

But the one thing that is the most universal — to love and be loved in return — is the one thing that cannot be accomplished simply by force of will.

And yet, we never lose hope. Songs are written about love everyday, people peruse the dating apps even after they swear off them, others check their horoscopes to see if today might be the day that love — mutual love — walks into their lives.

The miracle is not that people meet and fall in love. The miracle is two people seeing each other — really seeing each other — and arriving at the same conclusion: Of all the people in the world, you.

And somehow, impossibly, ditto.

When you really think about it, every couple walking down the street, who smile and take turns telling their “How we met” story, really is a tiny, beautiful miracle.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.