In a cynical world it endures, inspiring poetry and songs, sculpture and art. Romantic love has never been more alive nor seemingly elusive.
Despite broken hearts littering the path to its door, people actively look for love — signing up and logging on for it.
The loved up as well as the lovelorn seem fascinated by it, making far-fetched TV shows such as Love Island and Married at First Sight persistently popular.
What these shows are really selling is hope: hope for something better; hope to there might be a special person out there somewhere; hope simply that romantic love exists.
I am testament to this kind of love being real and worth holding out for.
This week’s high point is the second anniversary of the day my Beloved and I were married.
On a Friday afternoon in the pretty courtyard of our home, we made our love official. Two dear friends were our witnesses and over the following days, we told families and friends that we were hitched.
It was not as if we were naïve nor particularly starry-eyed: my rangy, handsome husband and I had each known heartbreak and been bruised in the washing machine of life.
But we reasoned that everything leads to here and here is a sublime place to be.
It has been accepted through time that love is the most profound emotion, the lifeblood of existence. Those we love will be in our minds as we breathe our last.
The Dalai Lama says that love is necessary and on Abraham Maslow’s much-vaunted hierarchy of human needs, love comes after physiological necessities and feeling safe.
My Beloved and I may have found our one in a million, but it turns out that together we are one in a hundred.
ABC’s Australia Talks survey revealed only 1 per cent of people end up marrying the boy or girl next door.
My Beloved was not so much the boy next door as the man upstairs: we each bought apartments in the same unit block and for a year and a half, we knew each other in passing — a wave at the rubbish bins or a shared eye roll at a body corporate meeting.
But then it happened. As John Green wrote in The Fault in Our Stars, we fell in love the way we fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.
We had dates. We wrote notes. We planned surprises. We still do.
Our love story might be as old as time, but it turns out our real-life coming together makes us unusual.
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A recent Relationships Australia survey found about 60 per cent of Australians used dating apps each year — a staggering number — and an ABC survey last year found that people are now more likely to meet their partner online than any other way.
They might meet that way, but it is only when people come together in the flesh that real love has the chance to come alive.
It is the quirks and jokes, the wanting to be together, the sharing of admiration and respect as well as the events of the day that breathes love to life.
Two years ago this week, my handsome sergeant and I made a promise to look up and see the other.
We chose each other that day.
Every day, deliberately, we still do.
I can’t believe my luck.
Jane Stephens is a USC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer. The views expressed are her own.
