Love is the lubricant that keeps our perceptual apparatus functional. In its absence, everything freezes eventually and we get “stuck in a moment”, to use a phrase from U2 that I like.
The love of others is good, but in the end the only thing you can rely on is the love you learn to bring consciously to yourself.
I have on my wall some famous Tibetan mystic. I think it is Padmasambhava. I really should know, but I don’t recall. But he has within his heart a man and a woman copulating. What I take this to mean is that we need to learn to carry within us the capacity for that sense of connection we associate with romantic love, and the completion of our sexual energy, without a partner. What we need is the completeness we feel with someone we love deeply, but that feeling without the need for that person.
Imagine being able to get to that point, without the manias we see portrayed and mocked and emulated so often in our movies, where people are desperate to find the right person, their “soul mate”. This seems to happen on occasion, but not for most people, not in most lifetimes.
Introjecting and expanding this energy is how so many Tibetans, back in the day, lived lifetimes of solitude, happily, I will surmise. They were not suffering, and for most of them it was not much of a renunciation, at least the way Alexandra David Neel perceived it and told it.