Love isn’t found. It’s built.
The Bachelor (and spinoff The Bachelorette) is an American dating and relationship reality TV series that debuted in 2002. Out of the 42 couples who ‘found love’ on the show, 15 are still together.
There are ~130M book titles in the world, and the team at Google Books wants to digitize all of them.
They’re making progress. So far, they’ve scanned over 40M books. That’s 30%. Not a majority, but definitely a representative sample.
And the Google Books team does more than just digitize the text, they make it searchable.
You can search their entire database of >40M books for words and phrases using their free Ngram Viewer.
Enter a word or phrase, and Ngram Viewer shows how often that phrase shows up in Google’s entire corpus of scanned books over time. 
Authors were especially interested in communism in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. 
19th-century writers were more interested in cholera.
...and social media doesn’t get any mentions before 2001. No surprise that social media doesn’t get mentioned in the 1800s. The two words didn’t even go together until the 1990s, when executives at AOL started talking about “social media” as they were developing AOL Instant Messenger.
In 1997, ~1,000,000 people joined the first social website, 6 Degrees.
Then came Friendster. MySpace. Facebook. Twitter. Tinder…
You know the rest.
Ngram Viewer shines a light on just how recent other modern concepts are too. Concepts we might wrongly assume have been around forever.
For example, in the 21st century, many of us are inclined to believe that love is something we search for and find. And when we find the right person, love is natural. Even easy.
But this idea seems to come from a very recent set of assumptions that started gaining popularity in books and other media in the 1980s and 90s.
Protagonists started searching for soulmates. Their one true love.
Sleepless in Seattle.
Titanic.
The Notebook.
I could go on.
Our ancestors would be confused by the idea that love is something we find. For most of human history, love wasn’t just a feeling.
The Hebrew word for love, “ahava,” shares a root with “to give.”
Love isn’t primarily a noun we search for.
It’s a verb.
The feeling is real of course, and at first it’s largely driven by hormones. Dopamine, Norepinephrine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Vasopressin.
That’s why the initial fall feels the way it does.
But the calm, quiet, hormone-free feeling of deep and sustained love is the fruit of the verb.
It’s not the stuff of Tinder. We don’t find it by swiping.
We build love through service, sacrifice, humility, kindness, patience, understanding, and daily forgiveness.
Falling is just the start.
“Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.”
- Rumi, 13th century Persian poet and Sufi Mystic
Love isn’t just something we find.
It’s more than that.
It’s something we build.
