one true love

Great Debates
1

I can’t believe this hasn’t been discussed before, and if it has please link me to it. I couldn’t find it.

Is there one true love, a perfect match for everyone? or do you go through cycles and there are perfect matches for you at different points in your life?

In the movie, a bronx tale, they say every guy will have 3 great loves in his life. Is this true?

when you fall in love you always think ‘this is it’. but when you break up, you feel diffently.

All this science, I don’t understand. It’s just my job 5 days a week-- Rocketman

2

There is never a “perfect” match. And there is no “one true love”. You meet people at random and fall in love with someone. If you’re lucky, the love is reciprocated. If things go well, you stay with them for a varying amount of time. Maybe you’ll stay with them your whole life!

Right now I’m in love. Does that mean that I didn’t really love my previous girlfriends? I don’t think so. You will end up loving some people more than others, so the one you love best could be considered your “one true love”, but there’s no fate or destiny involved.

J’ai assez vécu pour voir que différence engendre haine.
Stendhal

3

I vote with Jacques. I’m married and intend to be married for the rest of my life. In that sense, my wife is my “one true love,”–I’m not going to have any others. Could I find another person I love as much as my wife? Sure. She’s unique, but she doesn’t incorporate everything I find attractive.

To think that if I had made different choices and never met her is a depressing thought. But to think that I would never have loved anyone if I hadn’t met her is much worse.

-andros-

4

I think that understanding that there is no perfect “one” for you is a requirement for a healthy relationship. Anybody in any relationship, no matter how happy, is periodically going to meet people they realize that they could have loved, had things been different. If you believe in “one true love” this emotion is apt to confuse you–which one are you “meant” to be with? On the otherhand, if you realize that the set of people you could love is not the same as the poeple you do love, you are much less likly to run off with your dance instructor in a moment of passion.

5

I have three true loves in my life:

  1. Heather.
  2. Music.
  3. Sports.

Works for me!

Yer pal,
Satan

6

Why ONE true love? Can’t you love more than one person? Granted our society tends towards monagamy, but couldn’t there be more than one person out there who’s right for you, and more than one person who’s right for them?

7

Yes. There is only one true love for each of us. And YOUR soul-mate happens to be a 90-year-old Buddhist monk in a remote Nepalese village.

Better luck in your next incarnation!

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”

  • Bill Watterson
8

that’s great, can buddists monks (are there girls) say no?

All this science, I don’t understand. It’s just my job 5 days a week-- Rocketman

9

  1. I think Manda Jo hit it right on the head.

  2. I read somewhere that the average person falls in love seven times in their life. But “seven” sounds mythical enough to be an UL.

  3. Years ago, I developed my own “mathematical” approach to love. I won’t bore you with all the details, and I warn you that my romantic friends find it abhorrent, but everyone else I tell it to says “that’s it, exactly.”

    a) There is no “perfect” match. Any match would have to be a human, and no human is perfect.

    b) There is no “best” match. Compatibility is multi-variant. Human beings are a complex mix of physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual factors, none of which can be measured with mathematical precision. Someone may be just what you need in one or two areas, but not-so-compatible in others. The next person is stellar in a different area, but lacking in another. Repeat that for the 6 billion people on the globe – or even just the 100 available people in your circle – and you find there is no absolute ranking.

    c) Given that, as we mature and get to know oursevles better, we realize there are really only three or four (or at most half a dozen) things in life that really matter to us. And we realize that no one is going to agree with us 100% on any of these. But if someone is, shall we say, significantly compatible in all the important areas, well then, you’ve got someone you can live with happily ever after.

I have at least a dozen such people in my phone book right now. Alas, all but one are already married, involved, or possessing their own set of standards which I do not meet.

You see, experience shows that finding someone to love is not at all difficult. It’s getting one of those compatible people to love you that’s the tricky part.

And how does one maintain love in the face of the fact that your loved one is not unique? (This is the thought that infuriates the romantics.) It’s rather simple, really. My girlfriend is quite lovely. Yet every day on the train to work, I see girls whom I consider prettier. And as I gaze upon them, I can’t help but think, would she get my jokes? Can she intelligently discuss the issues I think are important? Does she know how I like my tea? No? Thank God somebody does…

10

I answered this in another thread but don’t remember which one it was. Anyway, I found that if you want to find your true love you should use astrology. I found in a book that my ideal mate would either be a Cancer or a Scorpio. I did not like all the Scorpio traits so I chose Cancer. Anyway, I didn’t really search out a Cancer but convinced myself that I would not be happy until I found one. Well, my current love is a Cancer, now. I told him I would not love him unless he changed his birthday, so I changed it to July 15th. He laughed, but then I threw him a birthday party, had the waiters at a restaurant come and sing to him, brought him gifts, and chided his friends for forgetting his birthday. It was a lot of fun.

Anyway, I know it wasn’t exactly the topic but I thought I should share.

HUGS!
Sqrl

Gasoline: As an accompaniement to cereal it made a refreshing change. Glen Baxter

11

Different “true loves” at different times? Worked that way for me.

My children’s father was perfect for me at the time we married - true love. Life was bliss for a while. Had we worked harder at maintaining that bliss it might have lasted a lifetime. It didn’t. And I must say that in a way, I still feel love for my ex. He’s basically a good person and someone I care about.

My current husband is truly a soul mate - true love again. If we’d met 15 years earlier we’d probably never even had a first date. But at the time we met, it was right.

On the other hand, my parents met in 1st grade. I don’t think either one ever dated anyone else. They’d been married 57 years when my dad died. One true love.

12

For what it’s worth: three/four years ago I would have bought into the ‘different true loves at different times’ attitude. Then, I met my sweetie. It was an Internet semi-blind date kind of thing, we were both nervous as hell for the first two dates but then we just settled in like we’d known each other all our lives. Kind of surprising 'cause I was 46 and she was 40. We kept comparing life experiences and have never missed yet. Last Christmas, I acted on a stupid private joke and got her a wood burning set. She chuckled and then ROLF when I opened the wood burning set she’d bought me. Her son just rolled his eyes and wondered what the heck was going on, but he can’t figure out much of this anyway so …

Anyway, we dated for over a year and then said the heck with it and got married <url http://www.CalgaryInternet.com/eric>for the third and final time</url>. This will be the third marriage for each of us and it will be the final one. I like her son, she likes my daughter (both of these have grown and neither lives at home any more), the kids like each of us and each other. We each hate our own parents more or less equally, we’ve each met the other’s parents and don’t understand what the problem is. We both got real grumpy one night and tried to have a fight - it ended with both of us wiping tears of laughter from our eyes because apparently we suck at fighting, it was so stupid that neither one of us could take it seriously.

I hope that this isn’t true - I feel so much more comfortable with my third great love than I ever had with anyone else in my life. Lately, I’ve come to believe that there is one special person out there for each of us. The trick is finding them - sometimes, you get lucky; sometimes not. I’d have been much happier if I’d just found the right one first and avoided all the intervening mess.

13

Fine. The url didn’t work, go to http://www.CalgaryInternet.com/eric for more information …

Sigh.

14

Great story, SuperNerd. May you and your lady have decades of happiness!

metroshane, I’ll take my tilt at the windmill of your questions. Three great loves? For me, the fourth time, at age 34, was the charm. I may be a mathematician, but numerology doesn’t seem to be my strong suit.

And is there one true love, a perfect match for everyone? No and yes.

I agree with the others who’ve answered that nobody is going to be perfect for another; we’re always going to have places where we’re in sync with our beloved, and places where we don’t have a clue about one another.

But, on the other hand, despite the inevitable mismatches within a love match, one person can be * right * for me in some way that nothing else can touch. At least, that’s my experience, which may or may not apply to any other human being on this planet.

Mind if I toss out a question, metro, that seems to be in the same family? (I’ll take it to another thread if you’d rather.)

Is there a difference between being ‘in love’ with someone and being infatuated with them? And if so, what is it?

I’m not looking for a definitive, universal answer; I expect a range of responses. I’m just curious about where the accumulation points might be. (Age of respondent would be illuminating, as well.)

In my case, I’ve experienced a qualitative difference; infatuations come and go, but the few times I’ve fallen in love have all almost been like something inside me knew who I was, and what sort of person I truly wanted, far better than I did at the conscious level.

15

Well, I thought I found my one true love once, but it just didn’t work out. I am convinced that in another place and time, it would have, but then, wouldn’t everything? I think (I hope!) that I may find another someday. Sigh. Who knows? Not me…

God is dead. -Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. -God
Neitzsche is God. -Dead

16

Soulmates are yours once in a lifetime.

That which a man had rather were true he more readily believes.

17

Hey!
Consider me a romantic but I like to think that each of us will have one true love. Someone who is a true soul-mate, sort of like what always happened in most of those great old black and white movies of romance in the 1950’s.

'course, such a person is hard to find and our emotions can get kinda scrambled up in the early ‘hot’ stages of love. I’d like to believe, like the song goes that ‘there’s someone for everyone.’

Mark
“Think of it as Evolution in action.”

18

Does not the concept of a “soulmate” presume the existence of a soul?

Does that mean we atheists have to settle for a personality-and-hormones-mate?

19

Hell, mormons have up to seven true loves. So I think that they are taking true loves away from us all. Let’s storm Utah.

Za’an kho’ku na tenshi no teeze. Kyoko Baby!

20

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