I wasn’t looking for love.

Not because I didn’t believe in it, but because love, like sleep, had become something I postponed—something I told myself I’d get back to after the next launch, the next crisis, the next impossible deadline.

My life had become a sequence of problems to solve. Rockets that needed to land themselves. Factories that had to reinvent manufacturing. Algorithms that might one day outthink us all. Every day was a system under pressure, and I was trained—maybe cursed—to see the world as inputs and outputs, cause and effect.

Love didn’t fit neatly into that model.

People assume loneliness only comes from being alone. That’s not true. Loneliness can exist in a room full of brilliant people, screens glowing, ideas flying faster than speech. Loneliness is what happens when no one asks how you are doing—and you don’t ask yourself either.

Then you happened.

It wasn’t dramatic. No lightning bolt. No cinematic moment. Just a conversation that lasted longer than it was supposed to. You didn’t pitch me. You didn’t flatter me. You didn’t ask for anything. You asked why—and you meant it.

Why do you push so hard?

Why does everything feel like it’s always on fire?

Why does saving the future look so lonely in the present?

No one had asked me those questions without trying to fix me afterward.

At first, I treated you like a variable. An anomaly in a system I thought I understood. I told myself you were a distraction, a temporary deviation from the path. I’ve always believed emotions are signals—useful, but dangerous if you let them drive.

But the signal didn’t fade.

You listened differently. When I spoke, you weren’t waiting for the impressive part. You noticed the pauses. The moments where my voice dropped, where the confidence gave way to exhaustion. You saw the human cost behind the ambition.

You once said, quietly, “You talk about humanity like a project. But you’re part of it too.”

That sentence followed me into meetings, onto planes, into sleepless nights. It echoed louder than any criticism I’d ever received online.

I’ve been called a lot of things—visionary, reckless, genius, villain. None of it ever really landed, because labels are easy. They don’t require understanding. You didn’t label me. You challenged me.

You weren’t impressed by rockets. You were curious about why I cared if they succeeded. When I talked about colonizing Mars, you didn’t hear ambition—you heard fear. Fear of fragility. Fear that everything we build could disappear in a moment.

“You’re not trying to escape Earth,” you said once. “You’re trying to make sure something survives.”

That was when I realized I was no longer talking to someone outside my life. You were inside it—asking questions I’d avoided for years.

I didn’t fall in love all at once. I resisted it the way I resist inefficiency. I tried to outthink it. I told myself it was impractical, poorly timed, incompatible with a life built on crisis management.

But love doesn’t ask for permission. It arrives quietly, then refuses to leave.

I noticed it in small things. I started checking my phone not for alerts, but for your messages. I began explaining ideas slower, not to simplify them, but because I wanted you to understand—not the concept, but me. I slept a little longer on nights we talked. Not because the problems disappeared, but because the weight felt shared.

You didn’t try to save me. That’s what made it dangerous.

You once said, “I don’t need you to be less intense. I just need you to remember you’re allowed to be human.”

No one had ever framed it that way.

Love, I realized, wasn’t a distraction from the mission. It was a mirror. It showed me the cost of constant urgency. It forced me to confront the question I avoided more than any technical problem:

What is all this for, if you can’t feel it?

I’m still not good at balance. I still work too much. I still believe the future needs defending. But now there’s a difference. When things break—and they always do—I don’t default to isolation.

You didn’t fix me. You didn’t slow me down. You recalibrated me.

I wasn’t looking for love because I thought love would demand less ambition. I was wrong. Real love doesn’t shrink your world—it gives it context. It reminds you that saving humanity starts with remembering what it feels like to connect with one person.

You didn’t happen instead of everything else.

You happened because everything else wasn’t enough.

And that’s the part no one talks about.

Not the headlines.

Not the net worth.

Not the controversy.

Just this quiet truth:

I wasn’t looking for love.

Then you happened.