First dating is often missed

To assert that a love story is a missed encounter with someone, doesn't the story first have to have begun, and therefore the encounter has not been completely missed? In this case, it is not really the encounter that is missed, nor the encounter with this person, but what follows: we have not been able to make something of it. True encounters are continued encounters.

The first encounter is therefore less important than the talent and ingenuity that we will be able to deploy to turn it into a story. It is only then, when at the heart of this story, we are found wanting, when we fail to understand the other or to keep our promises, that we can, I believe, speak of a missed encounter. There is no such thing as a chance, there are only encounters. It carries a dangerous implication: certain human beings are meant to meet, we would just have to leave it to fate. A missed encounter would then be a missed one with one's destiny. This is to minimize the importance of the story itself, of what will happen after the encounter and which depends on our talent, our desire, our will and our imagination. 

It seems to me that the real missed encounter has nothing to do  with destiny but with life itself and the existential creativity that it demands of us. Meeting someone, whether romantic or friendly, is not being a monad encounter, another monad who would be destined for him, but meeting someone with whom to invent a story, each daring this adventure at the heart of which he will change until he is troubled. A missed encounter is then a missed encounter with all these possibilities in oneself, with the very movement of life in that it disturbs our habits, our certainties as well, and takes us joyfully who knows where. It is when our fear of the unknown is stronger than our curiosity that we risk missing our date with life.