What Is Pure Love? — Is Finding Someone Irreplaceable a Miracle?November 7, 2026 (Saturday) Life at Eden in the Reiwa Era (Reiwa8)

What does it mean to fall in love?

Recently, I came across clips from a Japanese television drama, An Incurable Case of Love. The heroine falls for a doctor after seeing him show kindness to another person.

Watching the story, I found myself wondering: Can people really fall in love so easily? What does it mean to be attracted to someone? And what exactly is pure love?

Perhaps attraction begins with something quite simple: someone’s appearance, their voice, or a particular gesture. But getting to know that person is another matter. As time passes, we discover their personality, values, habits, and ways of thinking. We find things we admire, but we may also encounter things we find difficult to accept.

Falling in love and continuing to love someone may be two very different things.

Marriage, too, does not always begin with passionate love. Some people marry because they are deeply attracted to each other. Others choose a partner because they feel they can trust that person and build a life together.

Looking back on my own life, I realize that marriage was not necessarily the same as falling in love. I may have placed more importance on sincerity, trust, and the possibility of building a family than on romantic excitement.

Perhaps there are many different ways of loving someone. There is no single path that everyone must follow.

In the past, people often met through arranged introductions, families, or community connections. Today, dating apps allow people to search for potential partners by comparing their preferences and expectations even before they meet.

The ways people encounter one another have changed, but the essential questions remain the same.

Will we like each other? Can we accept each other as we are? Can we continue to share our lives?

Stories such as Your Name make us think about fate, chance encounters, and people who seem destined to meet. In real life, too, there may be moments when two people cross paths almost miraculously. Yet meeting someone is only the beginning. Whether that person eventually becomes irreplaceable depends on what happens afterward.

Perhaps what some people long for is not simply marriage, but the feeling of being truly loved by someone — of being special to that person, and of knowing that they would not be easily replaced.

At the same time, I do not think a life without romantic love is necessarily an incomplete one. People can care deeply for family, friends, and others around them. They can find meaning and happiness in many different kinds of relationships.

Still, I wonder whether meeting someone with whom we can share that rare feeling of being irreplaceable is itself a kind of miracle.

Is pure love something we recognize the moment we meet someone? Or is it something two people create together, gradually, over many years?

I do not have an answer yet.

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