Thread: Is love really real?

Since love is a feeling, it exists for each person who says it exists. If they feel like they are experiencing "love" then they are - because their definition of love is what makes it real. Other people may say "You just met so and so an hour ago at your brother's wedding," but they just have a different definition of what love is. They may later recant that it was love, but at the time it existed and was love since they believed it and we each define it ourselves.

Love is a powerful word and holds different meaning for many people. it can take you back to a time before an event; it can make you think of what you hope to happen in the future. I think its easy to say you expirence it because its not hard to accopmlish, you can fall in love with an object, a song, a book, an animal, a person and have the sensation of love twords it/them.

Finding the text book deffinition of true love is ,on the other hand, much harder to find; and i think that its often missinterupted with the normal type of Love. Finding the person you cannot live without, that every waking moment your away from them makes you feel like your very essence is being split in two is unfortunitly much harder to find. I believe that people can live perfectly happy releationships and live happily ever after with just the normal type of Love, but i think that people who find true Love are truely the luckiest people on earth and would do anything to maintain that. because if you have expirenced it than spliting it would feel like your soul has been permantly ripped in two, constantly missing your other half; and i find it impossible that anyone could live that way. Not to say when you find true love your garenteed that everything will work out flawlessly. ofcourse not, nothing in this world ever works flawlessly. But the effort you put into maintaing your true love just shows it more. The ability to give something up because you would rather see them happy instead of yourself must truely be an amazing feeling. to feel you can trust that person without a shadow of a doubt, that if they told you at any second you had to run away your mind wouldnt even think to question why; you would just go; as long as you could be with your significant other for the rest of eternity. I can only dream that i will be able to feel that way one day; and i undoubtly envy all those who have managed to find it.

"...and they lived happily ever after"

I think divorce rate is so high because people are in so much of a rush. People want everything and they want it yesterday. They rush into releationships thinking they have found their true love when in reality it was just a momentary missconseption that arose in their minds, they see the easiest way to solev the issue is to get divorced. I think that the process moves too quickly even on the way out. if both parties thought the same thing about their love at one point maybe its worth trying to go over the issues and look at compromises and work to fix your releationship. Sometimes it doesnt work out but atleast you gave it more thought than most couples facing the same thing did.

I think that the quote "In All That We Do, Let Us Do It For Love" is simply ingenius. People move so fast they can sometimes get cought up with so many other factors of life they lose sight of what is really important in the first place. So as a closing message all i have to say is, make sure that in everything that you do, your doing it for love.

I think love is, as you call it, a "temporary natural fix." It is your brain responding to certain stimuli by sending out chemicals which give you a euphoric feeling. I don't think that makes love any less "real." The exact feeling or cause of the feeling may be unique to each person, but it definitely happens. Anyone that has not experienced it in some way, shape or form (be it love of family, friends, significant other or higher power) may actually have something medically wrong with them that physically prevents their body from generating these chemicals.

That said (I use this term a lot in case you haven't noticed :-p), I think those chemicals eventually fade as one gets used to the same stimuli (i.e. the same person) over and over again. This increased "tolerance level" is why some people in a relationship need "more space," in the hopes that time apart will cause the tolerance to their partner's specific stimuli to go down and allow the euphoric chemicals to start flowing again. This is also what causes some people in long-term relationships to seek different partners or alternative activities to get that euphoric feeling back, or at least take their mind off not having it.

This reasoning is why I am now and shall forever remain single. While the thought of being alone 20 years from now may be daunting, it is nowhere near as frightening as the horror stories I hear from my friends who have failed marriages. I'm perfectly content getting my "temporary natural fix" from dating.

I think true love is real, it is in the air and all around.
However, I do think true love will fade away as well :(

@JustJenna, what you quoted from the bible reminds me one of my favourite movies ( A Walk to Remember ) and whenever I see that movie, I cry like a baby.

Whenever I love someone, everything around me gets a new meaning. They remind me the perfect moments I spent with my beloved. Love has the power to change the human nature. You start to think differently and feel differently. Something you dont care in a normal time can become significant when love has found you. It brings the greatest happinesses and the biggest sadnesses.

Love is like the wind, you can not see it, but you feel it. :001_smile:

Love is real

Love does exist and whenever you will fall in love(with or without your knowledge) you will feel the power of love :)

I like how JustJenna & Josh put the feeling of being in love and I agree with it. However I have a more objective/scientific/pragmatic (whatever u call it) perception of love and tend to think along the lines of Jingleheimer's post.

For me love is not something divine or the ultimate feeling that brings eternal joy and happiness like most people think of it. For me it's nothing special but a little trick that Mother Nature plays on us (and on all living creatures) so that two individuals of the opposite sex can spend enough time together to create an offspring. There is nothing special in it, it's just an ordinary instinct that every animal on the earth has, just like looking for food, getting hungry, sleeping etc.

It feels awesome and on-top-of-the-world only because the evolution has 'designed' it to feel like that. If it didn't feel good individuals wouldn't get together, wouldn't mate and the species would get extinct.

That is also the reason it doesn't last forever - because it doesn't have to. Nature and evolution care about the continuation of the population, once the offspring is ready to take care for itself the parents no longer need to be together so the love instinct is no longer needed and fades.

With primates AFAIK it's usually around 5 years (I may be wrong) that's why love with humans lasts around that long. Humans can however 'amplify' or 'hinder' it a little because unlike other animals we can think and can overcome and control our natural instincts to an extend.

So for me love isn't something special or divine, it's just a natural switch every living being on the planet has in order to continue the population. And as with every natural instinct we can control it to an extend so that it suits our society. Separations, divorces etc are a result of poor control over our instincts.

I put it this way. "Love is a verb", its not an emotion its something that you do when like someone a lot. Like is an emotion, Love is a verb.