I was at a party a few weeks ago. A friend of mine went up to a stranger and said: ‘[our mutual friend] said we were going to love each other! Why are we going to love each other?’. That stranger and his girlfriend spent the rest of the party in the kitchen, door closed, breaking up.

Being single makes it easy to take a posture of more intense openness. New people are exciting, not threatening. Each of them holds a tiny fragment of a possibility that they could be loveable, which even if not pursued, still represents a worldview in which salvation comes from the unknown. This is what love songs get right but dating advice gets wrong: most of the search is for the lovable rather than love.

Of course, while these others aren’t threatening to us, we can be threatening to them. It’s an experience every woman alone has had, where a girlfriend is thrust conversationally — sometimes even physically — in between you and the unknown. We feel maligned (‘I wasn’t even flirting’), judged (‘as though I would hit on him even after I knew he’s not available’), and sometimes, yes, disappointed. They’re defensively drawing a line around themselves and their existing relationships. Sometimes that’s a “quiet life at home with a person who they’ve teamed up with…for life” and sometimes it’s dysfunction and drama. The stagnancy of it itches at the skin of those forced to wear the exclusion.

As the modern world of dating crashes into our shiny new language models, we’ll be right back at Meet hot babes in your local area! Maybe our chatbots will flirt with their chatbots and the dates they agree to will be smoothly integrated with our google calendars, and everyone will be perfectly sorted into their quiet, loving pairs.

Perhaps then, once the chatbots are just a little better, we could stop building better and better chatbots. But maybe those new power couples would keep at it, to pay their inner-city rent and get their kids into the best schools and pin down those directorships. We’re right back at the question of enlightenment values: why so many profess and profane.

It’s a cliche to say people do terrible things for love, but I’d put it that’s for it as often as it is for want of it. I don’t think they all need hugs. I think some of them are afraid, terrified even, of losing the hugs they are getting. Nobody wants to go back to the dark years (or back on the apps). It’s very hard not to crave the felt possibilities for self-transformation that romantic love offers, and to forget, just like a bad trip, that transformation isn’t immune to false realisations.

I’ve been sitting on this response for more than a week now, wondering if I actually have anything original to say about either love or success. After all, if I know so much about it, why am I on my own tonight?

To your question: if life is good and should continue, why so many reckless existential risks? Maybe let’s stick with the classic answer: it takes strength to be gentle and kind.