Love is not such a noble thing as we claim it to be. It is not all encompassing, it is not untethered or free of boundaries. So much of it is fickle and shifting. It’s borne of convenience and timing, whether we like the sound of that or not. Love is rarely something that springs forth and attaches itself, it is a vine that slowly grows, if the conditions are right.

We don’t like to think of love as a technicality. A child of circumstance. We want to map it back to something higher. We want it to mean something more. Part of some divine plan that is unfolding right on schedule. At its simplest, love is too often a happy accident. A serendipitous clashing of all the right things at just the right time.

Like anything that grows, it must be nurtured. It must be offered the right conditions. Dandelions grow in sidewalk cracks, if the stars align, but they far prefer the open field. Some things, I will admit, seem like they were celestially devised. But happy accidents happen all the time. Humans have a beautiful tendency to trip into the right situations. There’s something in that, to me, that’s perhaps more compelling anyway.