The Myth of Being Meant

[A personal essay on love, choice, and the illusion of destiny]

I root for love embarrassingly hard.

I am a Jane Austen girl to my core. I love longing glances across crowded rooms. I love wit sharp enough to spark like flint between two people. I love yearning. I love flowers, dancing, handwritten letters, devotion, and the slow unbearable tension of two people realizing they matter to each other.

I adore romance.

Not even necessarily the physical parts of it, if I am honest. It is the intention that gets me. The choosing. The tenderness. The act of looking at another person carefully.

So perhaps it is deeply ironic that my search for meaning over the past several years led me directly into existentialism.

Specifically, Albert Camus.

Which, unfortunately for me, begins to unravel nearly every romantic instinct I naturally possess.

Because Camus does not leave much room for destiny.

No cosmic soulmate carefully designed for you somewhere in the architecture of the universe. No invisible red string tying two people together across time. No divine guarantee that certain people are meant to find one another.

Only freedom.

Only choice.

Only people meeting in the chaos of existence and deciding what to do next.

And I find that idea both devastating and strangely comforting.

Part of this philosophical spiral, embarrassingly enough, was triggered by a crush.

I know.

Mortifying.

But to be fair to myself, he did flirt with me. Repeatedly. There were jokes in the comments. Kissy faces. That particular kind of playful wit that makes a person feel briefly singled out in a crowded digital room.

And he was Southern.

Which honestly should have been my first warning.

I probably should have been smarter about it. You know Southern charm is devastating. You know a witty man with an accent and good timing is historically dangerous to your emotional stability. Come on, Ladybird.

But there is something disarming about being noticed. About playful attention arriving often enough that your mind begins quietly building narrative around it.

So naturally, my deeply romantic brain began constructing possibilities out of approximately four interactions and a dream.

I thought: well, he seems single. I am single. Perhaps the universe is lightly arranging something.

Then, casually, he mentioned having a crush on someone else.

And I remember feeling my entire internal narrative quietly collapse in on itself.

Not dramatically. Not heartbreakingly. Just enough to expose something vulnerable underneath it:

how badly I still wanted to believe in inevitability.

Because I love soulmate stories.

I love reincarnation tropes. I love lovers finding each other across lifetimes. I own books filled with these stories. I love the ache of them, the idea that love could somehow survive death itself.

And yet I remember watching one series where two characters built a relationship so believable, so tender, so alive that I became deeply attached to them as a couple. Their chemistry felt earned. Chosen. Human.

Then the story revealed that she had another “true” love from a past life.

She remembered him.

And she left.

I remember feeling unexpectedly disappointed.

Not because I disliked the trope—I adore the trope—but because something about the moment unsettled me. The relationship I had emotionally invested in was suddenly reframed as secondary. Temporary. As though love consciously built in the present could not compete with love that had been cosmically assigned beforehand.

And what stayed with me most was her expression.

She looked so sad.

Not like someone running joyfully toward the love of her life, but like someone surrendering herself to a story she believed she was obligated to complete.

I remember thinking: but you love him too.

Not the past-life love. The person standing in front of you now. The person you laughed with, chose, built intimacy with in real time.

And yet the narrative treated that love as lesser because it was not destiny.

Part of me reacted immediately:

Choose.

Choose the person you love now. Choose the life you built consciously. Choose your own heart.

What strikes me now is that I felt this long before I had the language I have today around autonomy and agency in a deeper sense. Even then, something inside me resisted the idea that love should override choice simply because it was framed as fate.

And that surprises me, because I am deeply romantic by nature.

But I think what I love most is not inevitability.

It is willingness.

Maybe that is why existentialism unsettles me and comforts me at the same time.

Because if Camus is right, then nobody was made for us.

No one was designed specifically with us in mind. There is no cosmic guarantee that the person we love will appear exactly when we need them. No destiny quietly arranging encounters behind the scenes.

At first, I hated that idea.

I wanted the universe to be romantic.

I wanted to believe that somewhere, somehow, people belonged to each other before they even met.

But the longer I sit with existentialism, the more I wonder whether choice is actually more meaningful than destiny.

After all, destiny requires very little from us besides arrival.

Choice is different.

Choice requires seeing another person clearly and continuing toward them anyway. It requires effort, vulnerability, attention, presence. It requires waking up repeatedly and deciding, over and over again, to remain.

Perhaps there is something more romantic than being destined for someone.

Perhaps real romance is someone looking at the entire chaos of existence—the randomness of timing, circumstance, suffering, freedom—and saying:

I choose you anyway.

And then I find myself wrestling with my own instincts again.

Because part of me still wants an answer. A fixed position. A final truth I can hold onto about what love is and what it is not. Whether it is fate or biology or choice or something else entirely.

But the more I sit with it, the more that certainty begins to feel like a kind of narrowing in itself.

As though I am trying to pin something alive into stillness so that I can understand it.

And love does not really stay still long enough for that.

Neither do people.

Neither do lives.

So I find myself returning, not to a conclusion, but to something softer than that.

A willingness to stay in motion.

To let meaning shift as experience shifts.

To allow love to be at once biological and chosen, instinctive and intentional, grounded in the body and shaped by consciousness.

Not a single fixed definition—but something that changes as we change.

And maybe that is the only form of certainty available.

Not destiny.

Not design.

Not finality.

But fluidity.

A willingness to move with what is, rather than forcing it into something it is not.

Like the universe itself—endlessly unfolding, never fully resolved, always becoming.

And perhaps love, too, is not something we arrive at in its final form.

Perhaps it is something we keep participating in.

Again and again.

In motion.