True love. Everybody wants it and nobody really knows what it is. Ask around, and you will get a lot of different answers. However, put those answers together, mix in selected literary classics, add a dash of pop culture and a sprinkle of internet memes, and you get roughly the following ideal: true love is loving and being loved forever by someone who cherishes you more than anything else.

We can break down this ideal to a few central tenets.

First, there is the surprisingly ancient idea that true love is about ‘finding the One’, the person we are destined to be with, our other half. We wander on the earth looking for the one person who can complete us. In this fatalistic way of approaching true love, true love is rare, insofar as it is bound with luck and uniqueness. This conception is usually appealing to younger idealistic people, although we might wonder if it’s going extinct in the era of polyamory.