Why do unfree, generally single people in our enlightened age waste time on romantic correspondence on social networks? A holy place is never empty, you’ve already heard about this more than once... This applies to everything , including the structures of our relationships and our internal desires. Remember Maslow with his famous pyramid of needs? The need for love and belonging is one of the main ones in our lives. And so, let’s say, a person lives and he has everything - at first glance. And home, and family, and a favorite job... But there is no love and a sense of belonging. After all, it happens that there is a family, but there is no love and belonging? And a person finds some kind of outlet. For example, an interlocutor from the Internet. It's so convenient! You can talk to him for hours, write him poems, cry into your vest if there are quarrels at home or at work. This wonderful, distant person is completely devoid of the shortcomings of your loved ones. He doesn’t demand money from you (or an account for the money spent), he doesn’t throw socks and other items of clothing around the house, he doesn’t feed you boring dumplings, he doesn’t interrupt you when you are overcome by a lyrical impulse with questions about where the food/shirt/ money. He is the embodiment of the romance of a relationship at the stage of light love. And your eyes light up again, and you want to take care of yourself, and the evenings seem intoxicating, and your thoughts every now and then return to that... To the one whom your imagination drew. Yes, yes. A picture, even made in the most rosy colors, still remains two-dimensional, divorced from reality. Some of the virtual acquaintances will develop into real acquaintances, some never. Yes, this is probably not important. Something else is important. The fact that such a craving for Internet relationships is a symptom. This means that in your living, real relationship “in real life” someone is missing something. But something, on the contrary, is superfluous and spoils the picture. It is natural for us to fall in love. But who said you can't fall in love with the same person twenty times? Ask those who are happy (precisely happy!) married for about twenty, thirty, forty years. Would you say there are few of them? Well, maybe getting a divorce (in the registry office or in the shower) is now more fashionable than building long-term relationships. But who said that this path cannot become yours? Moreover... Remember this question: It happens that there is a family, but there is no love and belonging? It has a catch. Maybe it does happen, but extremely, extremely rarely. Much more often, something else happens: love and sincere feeling for someone with whom you live every day turns out to be buried under a layer of resentment, irritation, petty nagging and boredom. And then love may not be visible. But that doesn't mean it's not there. If you wish, you can fan a big, hot fire even from one small, barely smoldering coal. And next to it it can actually be much warmer than late at night in front of a blue laptop screen... in a conversation with a ghost.© Alexey and Maria Afanasyev. This text is part of a commercial publication and is protected by copyright law. Any use of the article or its fragment is possible only with the written permission of the copyright holder with mandatory indication of the original source and full name. authors