Doesn't Everyone Just Want Everyone/Someone to Love Them?

So I was just thinking about a few things. For one thing, I was looking at an online dating website where there is a section called "I Saw U." People go on this section and they write about how they saw someone in a certain part of the city and they say things like "oh I was walking on such and such street and saw you with your such and such dress and you looked great and we smiled but I didn't say hello. Lets hang out." Or they say something like "oh I was at this concert and we danced together but you left before I could get your name. Lets get coffee?"

It is basically a place where people can vent the frustrations that come from having fantasies of attractive people. What they are like. What they do. Who they are. How great it would be to know them. How great would it be to know them?

Not knowing people, yet seeing them, is so strange. All those clothes and styles. All that presentation and allure.

This also reminded me of a novel that I read a while ago. But I seriously cannot remember what it was. Maybe it was a short story. But in any case it is bothering me.

But the idea expressed in the fiction was this: that everyone wanted someone who would love them and care for them, and that there were so many hundreds of thousands of people in this world, that everyone should love everyone and someone. But people didn't want everyone to love them. That there were all these people who could satisfy each other's loneliness, but that that isn't how it goes.

How are there so many people in the world, and so many of them potentially lonely, yet so few of them able to find each other? What comes between these people? What prevents them from finding one another and feeling less lonely? At the very least they could feel alone together. Which sounds better.

This part of this website reminds me of what it is like to see beautiful strangers that you think you want to know. And that makes me think of how concepts get in the way of people. We think people are beautiful, or that their clothes or hair are great, that they look charming or exciting. People look certain ways.

But when we get to know someone do they still look those ways to us? Yeah, I guess people can still look certain ways when you get to know them. But it is different from how they look when we don't know them.

What I'm getting at is that when we actually meet someone they feel a certain way. They don't just look certain ways, they feel like something. They have a palpable shape in our lives and in our minds. Something about simulation and mental modeling.... People feel a way in my mind.

But I dunno. I find it all very odd and frustrating. The masses of people all around me and the difficulties of getting to know them.

I also wish that I could remember who wrote this thing that I'm thinking of. Who wrote about this loneliness that no one is assuaging. Why don't all these lonely people come together?

Because it is too easy to say what you don't like. Too easy to say that this or that person isn't your type or whatever.

This was a spur of the moment post. Who knows what I'm talking about.

Oh and then I googled all the novels I have read recently, which isn't many, and found the passage. It is from Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, which is probably my favorite novel I have read this year. Great novel.

If you care to search on google books, you can find the passage on page 179 of Sputnik Sweetheart.

Why do people have to be so lonely? Why do people have to not connect with each other? Why is it so hard to feel close to other people? Lots of reasons. I suspect language and mental modeling have something to do with it. Depersonalization, as a super loose idea. Who knows. But I want more connections. Maybe I should be more talkative and loving. I already am I think. But maybe I should be pushing myself harder to be loving and talkative.

Here I go.