That One Person
finding them might be the closest thing to coming home.
The first time I understood what it truly meant to yearn for affection was also the last time I ever begged for it. I learnt that the moment you place your head upon the chopping block and allow another person to decide whether you deserve execution or mercy, it is no longer desire, no longer romance, love, or whatever elegant names we have invented for that peculiar ache.
It becomes something far less beautiful, far less equal. It becomes a relationship between a slave and a master, where one person possesses the frightening chance of deciding whether the other survives emotionally for another day.
I understand what a profound privilege it is to have just one person firmly on your side. When the world is caught in the eye of a furious hurricane and everything familiar begins to overturn itself, there remains a small chamber within your heart that refuses to panic because that is where they live. It is astonishing how one human being can become an address, a destination, a refuge.
Because you know that all you have to do is get home to them. All you have to do is reach for your phone and hear their voice. All you have to do is make them say, “Everything will be okay,” and somehow those four ordinary words become architecture strong enough to hold up an entire collapsing world.
It is not a crime. In fact, it is perhaps one of the closest things to normality, one of the clearest signs of a well-functioning heart, to want one shoulder upon which your tired head can always find permission to rest. To long for that familiar body scent, almost sacred in its familiarity, at the end of every exhausting day.
To crave their embrace while standing in an endless Monday queue or surviving another Tuesday wahala that seems specifically designed to test the limits of your human patience. There is nothing childish about wanting somewhere to return to. Even birds, after wandering impossible distances, still remember the direction of home.
They want you. You want them. They need you, and you need them in return. It is an affair that burns steadily upon the altar of what two adults choose to believe about one another, what they choose to protect in one another, what they choose to forgive, respect, admire, and love in one another.
Then comes the holiest part of it all: each morning, each evening, each ordinary Tuesday and impossible Thursday, you continue choosing one another. Not because life has become easier, but because love, in its purest form, is less a feeling than a decision that keeps renewing its own vows against every inconvenience, every misunderstanding, every odd stacked against it.
I have realised that human beings are naturally greedy. We hunger for wealth, for achievement, for status, for possessions that promise permanence while quietly decaying with time. We gather accomplishments as though they could one day substitute for companionship. Yet when it comes to the delicate art of existing between yourself and the world, something remarkable happens.
We discover that we do not need an army. We do not need a crowd. We do not even need a dozen faithful souls. More often than not, all we truly need is one person. Just one. The one who whispers “goodnight” into your tired ears after a day that has taken everything from you, and “good morning” softly into your face before the world has another chance to ask for more.
If you are on a quest to find that one person, I hope you never allow algorithms or the loud cynicism of the internet to convince you that it is a vain pilgrimage with no destination. Do not let timelines mistake rarity for impossibility. Because even if the journey feels endless, even if the world insists that lasting affection is an outdated myth, I still believe the search is worth every mile.
And even if there were no other reward, I can promise you this: finding them means you will never truly be cold on rainy days, and the fiercest sun will somehow lose its cruelty on the hottest afternoons. They become your private climate, your own impossible season. The surest way to perfect weather in a country, and perhaps in a world, that has never once promised perfection.
That is your one person.
In your search, just know that love will never ask you to kneel; you are simply standing before the wrong altar. The right kind of love does not make you audition for your own existence or convince another person that you are worthy of tenderness. It does not keep your heart suspended between hope and humiliation. It meets you standing.
It holds your face with the same hands that could have wounded it and chooses, every single time, to be gentle instead. Maybe that is what finding your one person really means, not discovering someone before whom you are willing to lose yourself, but finding someone in whose presence you never have to. Someone who reminds you, over and over again, that affection is a gift to be received, never a debt to be begged for, and that the safest place love can ever ask your heart to rest is beside another heart that has already chosen it.