Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

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steve55
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Post by steve55 »

sea_dragon wrote:
Ghost wrote:No. The idea of true love (or even "love" at all) is a modern invention. For much of history, the concept didn't even exist as we think of it today. The concept of love in modernity is a feeling, and it blows with the wind. The ancients would have seen it as a fulfilling of duty, more or less.

This isn't to say that it is that simple to let go of. We seek out what we understand as romantic love because we are all products of our culture - cultural robots so to speak. Not that one can't break out of it, but it is difficult to go against programming.
This. 'True love' is just an illusion. It is nothing more than lust.
Sorry MarcosZeitola, but Sea dragon is right. What we refer to as "true love" is nothing more than intense lust. Science and relationship experts confirm that. For example, see this article that clearly states this. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -love.html

Nothing wrong with being in lust though (aka: true love), even better if your lust can turn into a deep real love over time.
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Post by Bane »

"Do you think you will find true love?"

Already have!
"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." -Oscar Wilde

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Franco
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Post by Franco »

I found my Bella. She's the love of my life. I used the resources of HappierAbroad and it lead me to her. Her love has humbled me in so many ways. I don't feel angry anymore. I'm not bitter. I can fully enjoy life with a good girl by my side. Love can happen. It doesn't happen when you want it to. Most guys do feel lonely, feel hopeless, and think there's no woman out there for them. That's not true at all. There's 6 billion f***ing people on this planet. All you have to do is try. All you need is faith. It's not about religious dogmatic bullshit. It's about trusting your God-spirit that all of us have. Be patient and improve yourself as a good person and human being to others.

Karma rewards kindness. Jah Love.
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MJay1978
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by MJay1978 »

RickyRetardo wrote:More and more, to me, it seems like a fairy tale. Relationships seem like they're just about status and sex.
That's how I feel about America. To be honest with you, as long as I'm here, I'm going to keep going my own way as a M.G.T.O.W. There's still too much narcissism, shallowness, and most women with no substance here. And this problem is not getting any better along with the other problems that come with the American culture. Doesn't matter if I find a foreign woman or not. Marriage is simply out of the question. And if I'm to be with her forever, I'm going over to where she is. I don't want to stay any longer in America than I have to. I know there is a way out. I'm just waiting for the right time to do it. I'm still getting my shit together first.
MrMan
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by MrMan »

I remember going to the mall and the cinema alone, seeing all the couples. I remembers eating out, sometimes alone, and seeing the couples, and I didn't have a girlfriend.

And sometimes I'd ask how long it was going to be before I met that special someone. I was looking for a wife, not just a date or a girlfriend.

But it happened, and I met her. My guess is if some of you guys meet someone and you realize you are able to spend your life with that person, you just might be a bit less bitter toward American women and the US in general, though I'm not sure of it.

Is 'true love' a myth. I wouldn't say that. I would say that the idea that some women, and men too, have of 'true love' is a myth. The Disney version where a man and woman meet and because they have certain feelings, it is guaranteed to last forever is a myth. But it is not a myth that it is possible to meet a woman who will love you and care for you through difficult times and make a real commitment. It's unrealistic to think that you are always going to be on cloud 9, crazy about your spouse. Sometimes, you may get annoyed with your wife and she may get annoyed with you. It happens.

I do think we have to be somewhat practical about the love issue. Feelings don't justify making stupid or immoral decisions. If you feel strongly for a woman, that doesn't mean you should marry her even though she's likely to be a bad wife, a bad mother, and maybe kill you in your sleep. If you have strong feelings for a woman whose married or a close relative, that doesn't mean you should sleep with her.

But feelings are important and a relationship and it's good to have strong feelings for your wife.
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publicduende
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by publicduende »

steve55 wrote:Sorry MarcosZeitola, but Sea dragon is right. What we refer to as "true love" is nothing more than intense lust. Science and relationship experts confirm that. For example, see this article that clearly states this. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -love.html

Nothing wrong with being in lust though (aka: true love), even better if your lust can turn into a deep real love over time.
Relationship experts claim this is because arranged matches are carefully considered, with thought going into whether potential partners’ families, interests and life goals are compatible.

This means they are more likely to commit for life – and to stick together through rocky patches.

Those who marry for love, on the other hand, tend to be blinded by passion and so overlook these crucial details.
Arranged marriages made sense when family sons and daughters were under their parents' authority virtually until being married and leaving their family nest. Kids were deemed ready for marriage far before they could learn anything useful about love and life. And if they did know something (usually the man, as social rule demanded the woman to be a virgin), they knew how to take their clan or family interest (a union with a peer in socio-economic status, for example) into consideration.

If grown into a powerful or even middle class family, especially in countries with high level of social inequality, they knew full well they could always have pretty young lovers on the side whenever they needed one, while keeping the socially-blessed union as a convenient front. Being more explicit: this is still the norm in Colombia, and still very much the norm in the Philippines.

In most modern "advanced economies", things are different. Men and women tend to gain independence from their families before they decide to marry, usually even before they start looking for long-term relationships. They gain life experience through living away from their family nests, working their jobs, developing social circles, interacting with hundreds of different people and absorbing huge amounts of peer judgement, not to mention all the external conditioning from the popular culture and the media. They also learn about the opposite sex by engaging in anything between one night stands and flings to committed relationships.

With all these inputs, all this life experience, it is assumed that a young man or woman will gain enough wisdom and discernment to make a good choice of a (potential) lifetime partner.

And we know this is rarely the case. Vanity and narcissism run rampant, twisting both (and mainly) women's and men's perception of what they should give and expect an interaction with the opposite sex, be it a night of casual sex or a committed relationship. Careerism and financial independence tend to give both genders, again especially women, a false sense of security that they will be able to ride the fun carousel for as long as they like and then commit to the first "good enough" man who seems to care.

Let's add the "lonely puppy" phenomenon that is so widely discussed here: hordes of socially frustrated and sexually starved young men who have forgotten (or never learned) about the value of deeper, truer human relationships, how much harder they are to gain and how much more rewarding they can be when gained. To all those men, perceptions of what's good for the short term and the long term, what yields a quick measure of pleasure and what holds the promise of something bigger and more stable, are all distorted.

It is in these large grey areas, in these territories, that bad choices are made, and all sort of snake oil salesman industries like PUA, per-profit matchmaking are allowed to flourish. Given enough unfulfilled desire and expectations, a desperate man will believe in anything and do anything he gets to believe in. Only to have to regret later.

In all this mess, popular and family wisdom (another word for plain "common sense") sound like distant echoes of the past, a good decade or two far away.

Basically, parents are no longer expected, indeed they don't even have the authority, to impose or suggest potential partners to their sons and daughters. Society evolves faster than family wisdom and traditions can keep up with and the rift between generation is wider than ever. This means parents literally have no clue what would be a decent, compatible partner for their kids, nor they care too much.

At the end of the day, Steve, choosing when and whom to marry, if marry at all, is just another informed choice. A choice informed by a plethora of life experiences, some tracing back to early childhood role models, timeless values passed on by one's family circle, some dictated by the glamour of the moment or convenience, some others borne out of pure lust.

Yes there might be benefits in choosing your fiancée when you're 18, from a cosy shortlist of 4 decent girls from similar backgrounds that your family will have given you. In this time and place, though, I think it's even better if one develops that sense of judgement entirely by themselves, as a healthy mix of traditional wisdom coming from his legacy and personal ideas and preferences built over the years as a result of his psycho-socio-sexual development.

This is why, I believe, it's no longer advisable to marry too young and without having at least a few experiences that could give us at least some basic coordinates of what we expect and are prepared to give to a long-term partner, or even if we are LTR/marriage material at all.

If love is a language, than "true" love is our ability to express what we really are and feel using this language. Like all learning processes, it takes time, and it's by trials and errors which one has to make entirely by themselves. This is why the popular wisdom insists that "nobody can tell you what love is" and that one just has to get there and be there to know.
Vegascook
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by Vegascook »

True love as in the romantic love espoused by American TV and movies? If that's what you're asking if I'll find then I would have to say hell no! This is actually a fictional western construct that evolved from courtly love literature in which peasant males lusted after noble women that they could never have. The poets were dreamers who fantasized about romance that could never happen because noble families practiced arranged marriages. Throughout much of the world arranged marriages are still in current practice because they work. Cultural pressure keeps the bride faithful and compliant in an arranged marriage while in the US the woman can just walk away if she falls out of love with her husband. I believe affection and affinity will develop between the woman I choose to marry and myself, but "true love" is simply fiction. The US has commercialized "true love" and its courtly rituals to the point that it is financially burdensome for the average guy to even attempt seeking it. The last few years I've come to realize that women especially in the US don't believe in "true love" because nearly all their actions contradict the possibility of holding such a belief. Some women like money, some like power, some like men who are good with children, others like the pretend bad boy, still others seek the real badass who beats them and then they come back for more like it's candy. Now if women don't believe in such a thing why should we as men fall for such a load of BS. If women actually did believe in "true love" domestic violence wouldn't be so rampant, there wouldn't be as many fatherless children being born, and rich assholes wouldn't have gold-digging whores running after them.
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Contrarian Expatriate
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by Contrarian Expatriate »

These notions of "True Love" are usually preoccupations of unintelligent women, so when I hear men opining about true love, I get really concerned.

If you think you have found "True Love," in due time reality will hit you in the face. It might take many years to dawn on you, but that hit to the face will come.

Wise men think in terms of appropriate matches or satisfying relations with a woman.

The road to depression and suicide is littered with men ruined from notions like true love and the unrealistic expectations therein.
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publicduende
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by publicduende »

Contrarian Expatriate wrote: These notions of "True Love" are usually preoccupations of unintelligent women, so when I hear men opining about true love, I get really concerned.

If you think you have found "True Love," in due time reality will hit you in the face. It might take many years to dawn on you, but that hit to the face will come.

Wise men think in terms of appropriate matches or satisfying relations with a woman.

The road to depression and suicide is littered with men ruined from notions like true love and the unrealistic expectations therein.
It would be good enough for most men to just feel love (not "true", "genuine", "supreme", "universal")...just "love", even once in their lives. I guess we, as generation, are too preoccupied with trying real hard to love ourselves, which typically mean fulfil our lowlier desires and impulsions regardless of what happens to those we involve in the process.

I find a lot of responsibility and blame laid on the inabilities of women to feel love, bond, commit, respect a man. Again, it might just be me, but I have the stark impression that it's entire generations, both boys and girls, who have been swept by this form of emotional ADHD, where the first "D" is a dramatic deficit of empathy, or sympathy (in the Greek literal sense - to feel other people's suffering) and the "H" is the hyperactive routine many of us plunge themselves into - from womanising in trendy bars to collecting poor girls in the Philippines - so as to avoid remaining alone and face their emptiness.

As anyone who has fallen in love at least once can tell you, the act of loving, indeed the desire to love, sometimes even the belief that love exists and can be nurtured and reciprocated, is enough to overflow a man's (or woman's) life with meaning. And yes, love is a sharp tool that can cut through the densest fogs of fear, the thickest skin of cynicism, but can also result in wounds and pain. Yet, I believe, there is only one thing worse than loving and being hurt, and that's to never have loved.
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by S_Parc »

publicduende wrote:
Contrarian Expatriate wrote:Wise men think in terms of appropriate matches or satisfying relations with a woman.

The road to depression and suicide is littered with men ruined from notions like true love and the unrealistic expectations therein.
It would be good enough for most men to just feel love (not "true", "genuine", "supreme", "universal")...just "love", even once in their lives. I guess we, as generation, are too preoccupied with trying real hard to love ourselves, which typically mean fulfil our lowlier desires and impulsions regardless of what happens to those we involve in the process.

I find a lot of responsibility and blame laid on the inabilities of women to feel love, bond, commit, respect a man. Again, it might just be me, but I have the stark impression that it's entire generations, both boys and girls, who have been swept by this form of emotional ADHD, where the first "D" is a dramatic deficit of empathy, or sympathy (in the Greek literal sense - to feel other people's suffering) and the "H" is the hyperactive routine many of us plunge themselves into - from womanising in trendy bars to collecting poor girls in the Philippines - so as to avoid remaining alone and face their emptiness.

As anyone who has fallen in love at least once can tell you, the act of loving, indeed the desire to love, sometimes even the belief that love exists and can be nurtured and reciprocated, is enough to overflow a man's (or woman's) life with meaning. And yes, love is a sharp tool that can cut through the densest fogs of fear, the thickest skin of cynicism, but can also result in wounds and pain. Yet, I believe, there is only one thing worse than loving and being hurt, and that's to never have loved.
The only problem with associating *life with meaning* and *romantic love* is that one can manage the former but not the latter. A person can join a religious or spiritual organization (or even a solo practice) and find meaning. So when a lot of ppl talk about soulmates, they don't talk about practical ppl like Mel and I but more along the lines of some religious connection, not too distinct from rapture or beatitude. When I meet ppl like that, I tell 'em that a relationship with a woman is not like *finding Jesus*. Sure, that's usually not received well but on some level, that's somewhat the case.
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Teal Lantern
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by Teal Lantern »

Do you guys think you will ever find true love?
Yes. Was quite enjoyable but not as "everlasting" as the marketing dept would have you believe.
Every decent man should try to experience this (even if it's only feelings) at least one season of his life.
Good for long-term sanity and as a reference point.

RickyRetardo wrote:More and more, to me, it seems like a fairy tale. Relationships seem like they're just about status and sex.
This may very well be true. The upshot is "love" turns out to be a chemical reaction projected onto another person.
Those same chemicals can be brought about by certain foods, memories, and (I've seen, but not tried) even a nasal spray. :shock:
не поглеждай назад. 8)

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newlifeinphilippines
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Re: Do you guys think you will ever find true love?

Post by newlifeinphilippines »

S_Parc wrote:
publicduende wrote:
Contrarian Expatriate wrote:Wise men think in terms of appropriate matches or satisfying relations with a woman.

The road to depression and suicide is littered with men ruined from notions like true love and the unrealistic expectations therein.
It would be good enough for most men to just feel love (not "true", "genuine", "supreme", "universal")...just "love", even once in their lives. I guess we, as generation, are too preoccupied with trying real hard to love ourselves, which typically mean fulfil our lowlier desires and impulsions regardless of what happens to those we involve in the process.

I find a lot of responsibility and blame laid on the inabilities of women to feel love, bond, commit, respect a man. Again, it might just be me, but I have the stark impression that it's entire generations, both boys and girls, who have been swept by this form of emotional ADHD, where the first "D" is a dramatic deficit of empathy, or sympathy (in the Greek literal sense - to feel other people's suffering) and the "H" is the hyperactive routine many of us plunge themselves into - from womanising in trendy bars to collecting poor girls in the Philippines - so as to avoid remaining alone and face their emptiness.

As anyone who has fallen in love at least once can tell you, the act of loving, indeed the desire to love, sometimes even the belief that love exists and can be nurtured and reciprocated, is enough to overflow a man's (or woman's) life with meaning. And yes, love is a sharp tool that can cut through the densest fogs of fear, the thickest skin of cynicism, but can also result in wounds and pain. Yet, I believe, there is only one thing worse than loving and being hurt, and that's to never have loved.
The only problem with associating *life with meaning* and *romantic love* is that one can manage the former but not the latter. A person can join a religious or spiritual organization (or even a solo practice) and find meaning. So when a lot of ppl talk about soulmates, they don't talk about practical ppl like Mel and I but more along the lines of some religious connection, not too distinct from rapture or beatitude. When I meet ppl like that, I tell 'em that a relationship with a woman is not like *finding Jesus*. Sure, that's usually not received well but on some level, that's somewhat the case.

Bingo. Guys like public think that you have to start a family to have meaning in life. There is other spiritual ways too.
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