You may find yourself alone on a Friday night cuddled up with your dog, wishing you had a boyfriend or a girlfriend. When you're swiping through frat guys wearing flip flops and girls with eight different filters on their profile photos on Tinder, you might be hoping to find someone you can be with for the long term, not just for the night. And when your best friend mentions a guy she knows that could be perfect for you, you obsess over it until you can meet him because he could be "The One."

We're conditioned by society to need to be in love. When you're not in love, you feel as if you're doing something wrong and it consumes your mind every night that you go to sleep alone. When your dates lead nowhere and that cute boy hasn't texted you back in three days, it can be discouraging. But I'm here to tell you to just chill out. You need to let love find you and I don't mean that in a cheesy I-am-your-fairy-godmother way. I mean that true love has never come from someone actively seeking it.

Online dating and going out on the weekends definitely makes you more available and more likely to meet someone. However, plenty of people meet their loves at totally ordinary places like in grocery stores, dog parks and out of existing friendships. True love just happens. I am a firm believer in that. I once swore off men and declared my summer "The Summer of Me!" and then I met a guy within the week who would later become my boyfriend and the greatest love I've known. It always happens that way. When you least expect it, you will be bulldozed by love.

Think of it this way; when you hype something up, like a vacation you're going on or an event you have planned, you over analyze everything and need everything to be so perfect that often the thought of it is much greater than the reality. That's how people treat love. The want to be in love overshadows actually being in love. If you just let it happen, you'll know when it's real. You'll forget about all the time you spent trying to make yourself fall in love with the guy that you knew wasn't so great. You'll forget the times you told someone "I love you" just because they said it first. You'll feel real love in every part of you and you won't care about posting an Instagram photo just so everyone knows you're in a relationship.

Love requires no effort. It isn't a game you need to play or something that you need to seek out, or be "good enough" for. Just because you are not in love with another person at this specific moment in time, it doesn't mean that you are unworthy of love, it just means it isn't your time.

But it will be your time, eventually. And when that time comes, it'll be worth the wait.

For now, just let it be.