If love beggins in the intellect and is about the will power, then how can it fill our emptiness? There are many things in our intellects, things we know about ourselves, our friends and the world, and yet none of them fills our hearts.
God and man are like lock and key. He's the only One Who can really fill our emptiness. Everything that we love, is merely our loving what is infinitely true about Him.
But in this world, there won't be any rest or peace for some souls, and in any case, ALL must carry the cross, and be pierced by it's nails. For some, the cross will be interior desolation.
Some of us won't know peace or happiness until the next life. Is their faith dead? Or are their lives hopeless? But because those people who will bear such afflictions all through their lives, have the ability to choose to believe the truth and live it in spite of their feelings, those people can still attain their eternal salvation.
For some (and I suspect this is true of more and more people in this evil age... sin being the cause of suffering), this life is little better than a long stretch in a prison of flesh, wherein the only consolation is that (because of God's goodness) if they suffer it willingly, their misery will have an end and they will know (in some cases for the first time in their lives) what things like love, peace and happiness are. For someone with a parched heart going through this world that is a desert in terms of charity and peace, it may come to the point where they virtually never feel any consolations, from their Faith or anything else. But they can still embrace it as real and true, and live according to what it teaches, simply accepting their heavy cross here, which can really obtain God's very real heaven for them.
Unfortunately, though most of us will not face a whole life of interior desolation, most of us will still not have peace and happiness in this life. That is why this is called "the valley of tears". Those things... peace and happiness... belong to heaven. But while spiritual dryness and lack of consolation can be very heavy crosses in this life, they perfect the virtues in us because it is in such times in our lives, when living the virtues and the Faith have the least reward for us, and can be, then, out of the purest motives.
It's easy to love God when He sends us happiness and interior peace. It's easy to love God when He invites you to joys and gifts that are sweet. But you must love God
truly to love Him still, when He asks you to wear the crown of thorns, and thirst with Him on the cross. When He gives you the best gifts... those which purchase for us salvation by paying for sins... then it takes true love to be faithful to Him.
Remember that Christ Himself, in His passion and death, was willingly stripped of everyone and everything so that we might have eternal life. As the Bible says, the servant is not above the master. We all must, to a greater or lesser degree, follow in His footsteps. Even as Christ said, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" while He was hanging upon the cross, and yet knew (obviously) that His Father had not abandoned Him, so too, He sometimes asks us to have faith in the blackest moments. But even if we could suffer a whole lifetime, so that our life was utterly devoid of consolations, it would be a small price to pay for an eternity in heaven with that good God, after all of our sins.
It helps if we remember that suffering is not a bad thing. It is, after all, a fulfilling of divine justice, and the 'coinage' by which we purchase heaven. Holy joy and peace are not mere emotions, but are grounded and stem from the knowledge of God, eternal truths, and God's goodness. While we experience them emotionally, they are very different from the "easy" feelings of consolation we get when something pleasant happens to us or comes our way. Holy joy or peace can exist in the heart in the blackest moments, in the heaviest trials... through literally anything. What can bring us greater peace, or truer joy, than to contemplate God, His goodness, and the eternity with Him that awaits those who persevere in the Faith to the end, in spite of all suffering? The kind of joy or peace we feel ordinarily are just emotional reactions to things that are pleasant. The holy kind reacts to eternal truths, and the reality that a good life of faith leads to to God's real heaven.