Imagine meeting an entire stadium-full of people, 80,000 — give or take a few thousand or so. Not necessarily all in one day, but maybe over the duration of years, decades — a lifetime, even.

You might think this scenario only plays out for rock stars or politicians, not normal people like you and me.

You’d be wrong.

Meeting 80,000 people is the reality for most of us. According to our friend, Google, it’s the number of people we casually meet throughout our lifetime. I guess that makes us rock stars after all!

But meeting people and actually knowing them are two very different things.

How many people know you — really know you? The weird things you find funny. The songs that make you cry. The heavy cringe moments that still make you wince with embarrassment. The memories of kind words spoken that lighten your heart. The dreams you dare not even whisper out loud. The nagging worries that shout at you in the middle of the night.

All the thoughts — some secret, some not — that make you you.

Most of us don’t leave the doorway to those secrets wide open. In fact, the vast majority of us keep it locked tight. Unlocking that door — allowing someone to see the raw, unfiltered essence of who we are — is vulnerability at its best.

And typically we don’t lean into vulnerability; we run from it.

We know lots of people. The average person meets tens of thousands of them during their average lifetime. But knowing someone’s name isn’t really knowing them at all. At least not in the real sense.

There is a vast difference between the people who know your job title and the rare few who understand what fuels your heart.

And this is what I’ve been pondering lately: the miracle of finding the sparse few, whittled down from literally tens of thousands, who know you. Really know you. Take the time to know you. The ones who recognize you on a soul level. Those you count as a true friend.

What a beauty it is when you find that. What a beauty it is to be seen for who you truly are and to be loved anyway.

This is why it is deeply embedded within the human condition to seek love.

From a stadium. From a classroom. From a family. From a friend group. From a significant other.

But somehow love from the masses doesn’t quite equate to true love from a single individual. Isn’t that a conundrum?

Not really. I’ve come to believe it’s enmeshed into the human condition. We seek love, in general, but we super-seek it on a personal level.

It is one thing to be recognized by a stadium full of people; it is quite another to be recognized by a single soul.

And no matter our course in life, no matter our fame or fortune or celebrity, I think what we all desire at our innermost of desires is to connect and to know just a handful of people — to truly know them soul to soul.

We aren’t here to own a Ferrari or an infinity pool. Even the real rock stars among us aren’t here to entertain 80,000 people. That might be fun, but it isn’t the purpose. We are here to get to know one another. To connect with one another in the truest sense, the one that involves the heart.

— Jill Pertler’s column Slices of Life appears occasionally in the Times. She can be reached at slicescolumn@gmail.com.