Now, I am not going to open another debate, but I’d like to convey what I’ve been trying to say. While keeping in mind that I am devout believer of true love, I am currently getting tired of it. As Bryan said, true love needs faith, and I couldn’t agree more. But faith itself fluctuates; it has its ups and downs. The position of true love faith in me is currently at its lowest level, largely due to what I have told you. That life event really knocked me out. Yes, I wanted him badly, not only because I thought he was qualified, but also because I thought it was my turn. I’ve been seeing all my friends getting married, even the most hopeless one finally found someone to love. With all those conditions and my age, I guess it was not wrong if I was so hopeful and somewhat insisted. I only wanted someone to love me. It was supposed to be my time. So I prayed, hard and loud. But it was very heart-breaking when it was not granted. I was so angry with God. I have asked Him to help me with this, I told Him that I can’t live alone, but He seemed to remain silent, not doing anything. Off course I was not angry with God solely because of this matter. It is more of the accumulation of my dissapointments. I already have a health issue, my heart is not in proper condition which often causes me pain. Not that bad, though, but it is sometimes strong enough to make me confined in bed for several days. Fine, I (finally) accepted it. But then another surprise came: I have ADD, too. What the…..??!!?? With these two disadvantages, would it be too much to ask if I asked for a charming man to accompany me?

But somehow, I suddenly realised something. I didn’t know how it started, but I began to realise that I never enjoy my time of being a Singleton. All these times, all I did were hoping, praying, flirting with wrong man (usually with the man that I was not interested in. Oh, how ADD), falsely, abruptly falling in love, getting jealouse at a seemingly lovely couple who passed me by. I never sit and wait. I never enjoy my time being alone. So, from the moment on, I changed my attitude. Instead of brooding over my ‘misfortune’, I take this opportunity to nourish myself. I know, it is an old recipe, but everyone has her own time to finally understand and accept it. And, yes, I agree that one needs to accept herself first before she can accept someone in her life (which I’d like to write about in a different blog). All in all, I somehow glad that I’m not yet married. Had I got married, for example with my ex in high school, I could see myself to be in two conditions: either I got divorced, or living a gloomy marriage and raising children who do not understand why their mother cannot be happy.

So, that’s my AHA moment about true love. And Bryan, your ebooklet somehow came at the right time, just the time when I need to have the faith again. Now I want to take things easy, because now I know I didn’t miss anything.

Okay, back to work again. I love this discussion, I love this site, and I love you guys!

I just remembered this little poem from many years ago. I think you will like it.

“If you love someone, let them go…if they come back they’re yours forever. If they don’t come back, hunt them down and kill them.”

Riri & Bryan, the problem with love as we know it is that it is so entwined with what we have absorbed over decades of exposure to media – books, movies, internet, etc. – that if there really was such a thing as “true love” we wouldn’t know it…unless…of course…it made an appearance on Larry King. We compare our miserable daily existence (does anyone LOVE being in a cubicle in front of a computer? I doubt it) with what we read and see and we wonder, hey…where’s my true love? Where’s my prince/princess charming? Life is difficult and love is difficult too. As Janis Joplin once sang, “Love is s’posed to be a special kinda thing; Make anybody want to sacrifice” and, sometimes, that sacrifice can be a very difficult thing. Many people throw in the towel when they hit the “sacrifice” part.

Anyway…great discussion…now…I have to get back to my miserable cubicle.

I’ll respond in reverse order.

Glad you like the word “curmudgeon.” The word even SOUNDS curmudgeonly.

I like what you did with the equations. Very creative and, therein, lies the problem with the phrase “true love”…and which brings me to your first point. Despite the dictionary definition of the word “true,” the phrase “true love” is, I believe, often used to mean “the one true love.” So despite the various ways of arriving at the number four, I doubt that people think of true love in the same way, that is, that there are many ways to get to the same result. Instead, people look for “the one” and it is that concept that makes no sense. In fact, your expansion of my mathematical analogy implies that it is possible to arrive at the same result using many different formulas. If that also applies to true love, then there is no “one” true love but multiple ways to get there. That is, different people could have fulfilled the role of “the one true love” in the same way that different combinations of numbers in various equations can also bring you to the number four.

P.S. Am I allowed to say that I love these discussions?

Now, where the real controversy comes in from my little ebooklet is that I believe ‘true love’ doesn’t take into account distances or any other such factors that affect our daily lives. It just is and it will find us or we will find it. The ‘what if’ your true love existed a hundred years ago doesn’t qualify because if true love does exist, as I believe it does, then it will always find us unless we build resistance to it or oppose it. Now, here we go, that’s where having ‘faith’ comes in. To just allow something to develop or arrive without trying to force it, define it or map it out. I agree with what you say, Jeff, about the times we live in and that ‘these are atavistic throwbacks to a time when we did not completely understand the world, when we did not completely understand what was going on – psychologically and physiologically’ – and therein I believe lays the problem for so many. In this day and age everything must be defined and have a perfect understandable equation that faith and belief is something which should no longer be considered to the degree that we rely on it and yet, the road to so many being alone and disappointed is what has become far more clear.

It’s easy to argue that having faith and beliefs in something other than what is touchable and accountable and measurable is pure folly and will lead to disappointment, but is that really what leads to disappointment? Or is actually that we have become more dependent on the measurable and therefore hope and excitement for the unseen is losing its value. Now, we really are going deep. More and more people are giving up and settling and more and more people are become disappointed and complaining about their partners, blaming everything and anything but the fact that maybe, just maybe, they were impatient, desired security and didn’t believe they deserved something more or that even something more (true love) was even out there to be had. In desperate and trying times hope and faith seem to be the first things to go out the window, but maybe that’s when they are needed most. The more disappointments, setbacks and failed ‘dreams’ the less likely faith and hope will survive, but when it does I think the world is a better place where ‘true’ love does not only exist, but flourishes!

Riri, I am sorry to read about that chap who married your friend. I think I understand how much you wanted this person in your life. I think you know what would happen if/when we actually get someone into our lives that wasn’t meant for us and who actually desired someone else. In such a case I think it is better to be alone and grateful that our strong desire for them didn’t work. I have beat myself up for missing an opportunity for someone only to meet them years later and after talking to them for a while I finally realized there wasn’t too much we had in common to begin with. It’s so hard to come to certain terms within ourselves to allow ourselves to ‘just be’ and enjoy our lives day to day without trying to influence someone into our lives or just accepting anyone so we won’t be alone. I really do think that true love requires of us to be whole and complete ‘as we are’ before it will arrive. In today’s world it has become far more complicated to just ‘let go’ and ‘be’ than in the past when our ancestors didn’t have so many other factors to consider and/or worry about.

Bryan

You said that the problem lies with the word ‘true’ that is attached to ‘love’. To make this matter clear, allow me to consult Oxford dictionary to find the meaning of ‘true’. It turns out there are several meanings of it, but one description that I deem fit to this topic is ‘having the characteristic or the qualities of thing mentioned’. With this definition, we can say that ‘true love’ needs to be defined before we set out to seek one. What is the characteristic or qualities of love that we want to have? To put it in practice, we can ask ourselves what kind of man/woman that we want to spend our life with, how do you want your marriage look like? Once we find the mould, then we can start searching. So, in my opinion, the phrase ‘true love’ is not only makes sense, but it is doable, achievable. But what if the one, our true love is 3000 miles away? Hmm…ever think how a couple from different nations, one in Indonesia and one in America managed to find each other and got married? I also have an opinion that attaching ‘true’ to the word ‘love’ is not the same case with attaching the word ‘gift’ to ADD.

You also mention the equation that 2+2=4 is always true. Yes, it is. No one would deny that. But you should also see that to have 4, it is not always 2+2. 10-6 is also 4, 14-10 is also 4, (175×2)-(220+126) is still 4. So, if we fixed the value of true love to 4, then we can see that there are infinite equations that lead to 4. There are many ways to ‘true love’. Some people are lucky enough to have as simple as 2+2; they married they high-school sweet heart and had kids and grandchildren and lived happily ever after. But some of them have to bear a long, difficult, complicated equation before it finally reaches 4. Why? I don’t know. It’s not important. All we have to decide is whether or not we would work on the equation. If you would settle for 4,5, that’s fine. If you decide to forget that crappity crap equation, it’s fine, too. The choice is yours.

PS. Thanks for the word ‘curmudgeon’

I think the real problem I have is with the word “true.” Something that is true is true for all time. 2 + 2 = 4 is true. Always has been. Always will be. But “true” love? What does this really mean? I believe we often use it in the sense that there is this one person out there that is truly made for us. Well, what if that one person was born 100 years BEFORE your birth? What if that one person is 3000 miles away? In either case, how will we find that true love?

Further, my problem with the word “true” being attached to the word “love” is analogous to my problem of the word “gift” being attached to the word “ADHD.” We are making an error in the juxtaposition of these words and setting ourselves up for potential heartache if we take those word combinations at face value. Furthermore we tend to assume that they exist as some object, some “thing” that we discover or that we have.

Call me a curmudgeon but I think we would be better off banishing the phrase “true love.” The word “true” carries with it way too much baggage and, for me, at least, it has too many hollywood-esque overtones.

In a way, I said in the ebook exactly what you are saying here about modern logic and advanced knowledge, hence how common divorce, separation, single parents etc is – I said exactly what I meant to say in the ebook especially when I mentioned it would be controversial to some and that each of us has our own beliefs. Now, on the other hand, I am not sure about the two people you mention looking for love for 25 years and not finding it and that leads to another thing I mentioned within the book, ‘settling’. Just because we meet good people in our lives doesn’t mean we should settle down with them if we don’t really want to for whatever reason, it just won’t work and then when problems arise it really is because they were not true to what they actually wanted in the first place and did it so they could have someone and not be alone, – just to settle down and have ‘love’, but is that really love? I’ve done that and ended up divorced. Sure we could have blamed it on my behavior, or her sternness, it doesn’t matter, we weren’t ‘right’ together and we divorced. That was the right decision. After 37 years I found my true love. I can’t define what true love is for anyone else, just share my own beliefs. And, just to throw this out there: what’s wrong with gazing at each other and in turn gazing outward together in the same direction too? I gaze at Joan all the time every time I see her!!

I’ll continue my comment later. It’s time for me prepare myself to go to the gym.

Riri