The Universe Has Its Own Ways of Introducing People

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from never having been in a relationship.

And no, I don’t mean the kind where you sit alone on a Friday night, watch romantic movies, eat something unhealthy and complain about being single. That’s the version people mostly understand.

I’m talking about the kind that slowly convinces you that maybe you’re just not meant for this whole love thing.

You watch people fall in love, break up, get back together, complain about their partners, and then do it all over again with someone new. Meanwhile, you’re just there, watching from the sidelines like someone who bought a ticket to a show but was never allowed inside the auditorium.

You try. You like someone, imagine a few possibilities, perhaps even gather the courage to make a move. And then something happens. They like somebody else. They see you as a friend. They disappear. Or you discover that the person you liked was never really the person you thought they were.

Eventually, you get tired. Not angry at the world, not bitter enough to start giving unsolicited advice about relationships, just tired.

So you stop trying.

You stop looking at someone and imagining what could happen. You stop interpreting a smile as something more than a smile. You stop getting excited when a girl remembers something you said three weeks ago. You tell yourself that people are just being nice, because assuming anything else has only ever made things complicated.

And after a while, this becomes your personality.

You become the guy who doesn’t chase, doesn’t confess, doesn’t flirt, and doesn’t really let anyone in. Your friends might call you emotionally unavailable. You might even laugh along with them.

But the truth is, sometimes you aren’t unavailable because you don’t want love.

Sometimes you’re unavailable because you’re exhausted from hoping for it.

And then, of all the ridiculous ways life could possibly work, it happens because of a missed (Allegedly Spam) call.

A wrong number, or whatever the universe was trying to do

Let me tell you a story of a guy I personally know.

He’s never been in a relationship. Not because he didn’t want one, but because somewhere along the way he got tired. He’d seen how it goes. After enough rounds of that, he just stopped playing. A girl would show some interest and he’d look away before it could turn into anything. He thought of it as being smart. Honestly it was closer to being scared.

Then one regular day, his phone showed a missed call. Unknown number. A random one, connected to a girl who happened to work in the same office.

Nothing particularly romantic about it. If someone had told him that a wrong number would eventually become one of the most complicated parts of his life, he probably would have laughed.

But they started talking.

And then they kept talking.

Now, you can call that a coincidence. Most people would. But there’s this idea in Chinese folklore, the red string of fate. An invisible red thread ties you to the people you’re meant to meet, and it can stretch and tangle but never snap. Is it real? No idea. But try explaining a wrong number landing on the one person who ended up mattering. I’ll wait.

They started talking, and the coincidences kept stacking up. Same songs, same weird sense of humor, same love for the moon, same bad days at the same time. Little things where you’d go “okay, now this is just getting ridiculous.” The kind of stuff that makes you look at the night sky and say, alright, I see you.

And for him it was bigger than just liking someone. He’d spent a long time feeling like he was nothing, like a background character in his own life. She was the first person who made him feel like he was something. That’s a dangerous thing to give someone, by the way.

It’s beautiful, and it’s also why he got attached so fast. He wasn’t falling for her as much as falling for the person he got to be around her.

Now the twist. She was already in a relationship.

And the even bigger twist is that she might also have started falling for him too. Not a lot of people tell you this part, that sometimes the feelings are mutual and it still doesn’t fix anything. They both knew. Neither said it. You can have a whole conversation in what you don’t say, and they were fluent in it.

If you’ve seen The Office, think Jim and Pam, except with fewer pranks and no guarantee of a happy ending. Or if you know “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt, that song where he sees an angel in the subway, knows she’s with someone else, and basically says it’s okay, I’m never going to see you again anyway. It’s a love song, but it’s also a really polite surrender. That’s the feeling.

They had fights too, by the way. Real ones, about small things, about expectations, about who didn’t reply and why. And that’s what made it strange. They fought like people in a relationship, but they weren’t in one. No title, no rights, no “this is what we are.” Just two people who care about each other in the gap between friends and something more.

And that gap is a weird place to live.

Here’s what I keep thinking about. When a relationship ends, people understand it. There’s a word for it, a breakup. You get sympathy, you get time, your friends bring you food and say terrible things about the ex. But what do you call it when something that never officially existed starts to fade?

There’s nothing to mourn because, technically, nothing was lost. And that’s the cruel part. You grieve something with no funeral.

And him, he’s stuck in this loop. One side of him says, understand her, she has a life, she has commitments, who are you to complicate it? The other side says, what about me? What about what I feel? And he can’t tell which one is maturity and which one is just him being scared again.

So back to the red string. Maybe I’ve been reading it wrong. Everyone assumes the string means “you’ll end up together.” But the legend never actually says that. It says you’ll meet. It says you’ll be connected. It never promises how the story goes. Maybe some people come into your life to stay, and some come to show you that you’re capable of feeling something again. Maybe she was the second kind. Maybe that’s not a consolation prize. Maybe it’s the whole point.

Or maybe that’s just what you tell yourself when it hurts. I honestly don’t know.

So, what happens to the almost love story?

I don’t know.

Perhaps the boy and the girl eventually find their way to each other. Perhaps she figures out what she wants, makes an honest decision about her existing relationship, and discovers that the person she kept coming back to was the person she wanted to build something with all along.

Perhaps they try, and it works.

Or perhaps they don’t.

Perhaps the conversations become less frequent until they become occasional messages, then birthday wishes, then the kind of silence that no longer needs an explanation.

Perhaps years later, they’ll think of each other when a familiar song plays, when they see the moon, or when they pass a place that reminds them of an ordinary evening they once spent talking.

Perhaps they’ll wonder what would have happened if things had been different.

Or perhaps, with time, the memories will become less painful. The coincidences will become funny stories. The missed call will become a small, absurd detail in a life that eventually went somewhere neither of them could have predicted.

I don’t know which ending belongs to them.

And I don’t think we need to decide.

What I do wonder is whether the boy will ever look back at this experience and realise that the story wasn’t only about getting the girl.

It was also about discovering that he could feel this way about someone again.

That after years of avoiding the possibility of love, he was still capable of being excited about a person, of caring deeply, of laughing without thinking, of imagining a future he hadn’t allowed himself to imagine in a long time.

That he hadn’t become incapable of love.

He had just been protecting himself from the possibility of disappointment.

And maybe that’s what makes this kind of story so complicated. The person who helps you open a door you thought was permanently shut might not be the person who walks through it with you.

You can wish them happiness and wish, selfishly, that their happiness included you.

You can believe that the connection was real without knowing whether it was meant to last.

None of those feelings cancels out the others.

Maybe growing up is learning to live with those contradictions instead of forcing every story into a neat ending.

And maybe love, in some of its strangest forms, is not just about finding the person you want to be with. Maybe it’s also about learning when to hold on, when to speak honestly, and when to stop asking another person to give you an answer they aren’t ready or willing to give.

But I keep coming back to that missed call.

A completely ordinary thing that happened on a completely ordinary day, connecting two people who might never have spoken otherwise.

What are the chances?

Maybe the universe has a plan. Maybe we just happen to find extraordinary meaning in ordinary things when the right person is involved.

Maybe the red string theory is true.

Or maybe we are the ones who tie the string around our own fingers, holding on because we aren’t quite ready to see where it leads.

I wonder which is harder: meeting someone who never feels the same way about you, or meeting someone who might feel exactly the same way, but whose life cannot make room for you yet.

And if you ever find yourself in that strange place between friendship and love, between hope and acceptance, between wanting someone to be happy and wishing you were the reason for it, I wonder what you’ll choose.

Will you wait for the timing to change?

Will you walk away, even without knowing what might have happened?

Or will you stay long enough to find out whether the story you’ve been imagining is something the two of you can actually build together?

Maybe there’s no universal answer.

Maybe the story is still being written.

And maybe, just maybe, the hardest part of an almost love story is never knowing whether it was an unfinished beginning or an ending you didn’t recognise when it arrived.

But here’s what I’d ask you. If you were him, would you say it, knowing it might break the one good thing you’ve got? Or would you keep it safe by keeping it unsaid?

And if you were her, what would you want him to do?

Tell me in the comments. I really want to know.

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