WHAT IS LIFE WITHOUT LOVE?

What is the point of life, if not love?
We spend our formative years (hopefully) being taught how it feels to be loved unconditionally. In the process, we (hopefully) also learn that being loved feels very good, because we will want to know that feeling even more once we grow up.
Along the way (hopefully) we are watching and learning from parents, grandparents, siblings and others how to love. We see the sacrifices made willingly. We see the small loving gestures, the tender touches, the loving looks, the caresses, the closeness, the sharing of all things -- good and bad, pretty and ugly -- so that we can do this one day for someone we love.
Then, when the time comes and both heart and mind, soul and body, are ready, we begin to search the world for the one we are meant, created and built to love. There will be false starts, blind alleys and dead ends along the way and the path may twist and turn, rise and fall and test our resolve, determination and endurance, but to not continue, to not push on is to consider a lifetime without love.
And that would be a hollow, lifeless experience. Far too sad to even consider.
So we keep searching in the faces, the eyes, the hearts of all we meet. Is it her? Can he be the one? Always pushing past each disappointment and picking up the search where we left it. Because our hearts demand that we keep looking until, at last, it finds the heart that completes us.
Not once in this journey do we ever consider that maybe we will find this one, this better half, this soulmate and they will, for reasons we cannot comprehend, choose a life without love. For it is one thing to think we may never find our "one." It is quite another to think that person will reject us completely.
And then it happens. We are stunned, shaken and lost. Because the cause seemed so right, so noble, so perfect. There's no longer a need to search, for we have found. But what we have found, in turn, chose something and someone else. And we are left alone, with a heart leaden with love, heavy to carry, bruised and broken, but with no place to run, nowhere to turn.
For without love, what is the reason for life?