Do the people who go on reality TV shows really believe that they're going to make a love match? I don't know about you, but I would say the odds that I would fall in love with a randomly chosen man (even one who was supposedly handsome, rich, successful, the heir to a major industrial fortune, or whatever else) are slim-to-none. Even if you're the lucky bachelor(ette) with 25 people from whom to choose, the odds are not in your favor. Attraction, you might find. Fun, even affection, I could believe. But if finding love and making it last actually seemed to be the appropriate purview of reality TV, people would be fighting to have their own shows, not fighting over the remote to choose one to mock.

Finding a love match and making it last is hard work. You need to find a person with whom you are compatible in many different ways. There is a spiritual component, a practical component, and an emotional component, and each of these has many different areas in which it is manifest and intertwined with the others. Different couples put different degrees of importance on physical attractiveness and sexual compatibility, but regardless of how important or unimportant you think they are, it's another thing you need to have in common with your spouse for your relationship to work.

Your Personal Conception of a Love Match

Do you have to like all of the same movies, books, and music? Some people think there has to be almost complete overlap, while others feel as though it's fine to enjoy those things alone or with friends. Do you have to have the same religion or the same views on God? Again, that's different for everyone, but you have to find someone who feels the same about whether it's okay to be different. Do you want your partner to understand intuitively everything you say about your feelings, or it is okay if he or she works to do so and occasionally fails?

There is no single formula for a successful love match. Anyone who tells you that there is is misleading you or trying to sell you something. You can ask for advice from a doctor or from someone whose relationship has successfully withstood the trials of a long life together, but even the best advice comes from a point of view which is not yours. There are millions of people out there who have posted profiles on internet dating sites. If you really want love, realize that you will have to invest time and effort in searching for what you really want, but that search will be likelier to yield the connection that you want than any other method.