Love

I'm happy for you, OldCorpse! Also, thank you, sir! Instead of hijacking this thread completely, I may have to start my own and we can tell our stories.
 
Yes. I assure you there is a such thing as true love.

The majority of the time, relationships are formed from a "need" based love:
I love you because..
..the way you make me feel,
..you look beautiful,
..you treat me nice,
..you give me things,
..I want something you can give me,
..something is missing in my heart/soul and I hope you can fill that missing piece,
..I am lonely and need companionship...etc..

This is a relationship that is about "me" and what I want and need.
Nothing wrong with needing things but when two people get together for "me" then watch out.
Later it can become...I'm not getting what I want from this so I'm going to find it somewhere else....and it's your fault.

Then there is another type love, where the relationship is really about giving instead of receiving. It's two people devoted to each other and the other person comes before self. When two people are committed to loving the other then it is entirely different.
That's how people stay together when the going gets tough, the physical appearances are gone, the money is gone etc..

When contemplating a relationship that will require drastic measures, I recommend asking yourself why do I love her? What am I trying to get out of this? Or what am I trying to give?

Relationships among other things take love, communication and forgiveness.

Sorry this isn't explained very well. I am quite tired.
 
HorseFilms said:
Love is when your wife sleeps in a chair in your hospital room while you're recovering from your third cancer surgery in 10 months. When she takes time off of work to sit with you while you get injected with chemo. She takes a leave of absence when you've dropped to 130 lbs and need constant care. She almost has a panic attack waiting for the doctor to tell me that my CT scan says there are no signs of cancer left.

Love truly exists and I've been lucky to be with her for 13 years. Thank you, Allison!
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well, crap. i hadn't seen you around as much, but had no idea you had cancer. glad to hear you are doing better and have a wonderful lady in your life to help you get through the rough times. cancer may have cost you your front two legs, but it's good to see it didn't keep you from running again.
 
It's a bit like asking whether music exists. We all can see it around us and experience it. We can't prove it, but it keeps happening and we keep doing it and receiving it, and giving it, and creating it.

Personally, I think most of the best stuff in life is like that. Can't prove it or explain it with words, but it happens in plain site all the time so it keeps revitalizing its own presence and meaning.

Having said all of that...conditions can make it scarce to see or live. That's when **** gets very dark, scary, and above all else, lonely.

O
 
HorseFilms said:
Love is when your wife sleeps in a chair in your hospital room while you're recovering from your third cancer surgery in 10 months. When she takes time off of work to sit with you while you get injected with chemo. She takes a leave of absence when you've dropped to 130 lbs and need constant care. She almost has a panic attack waiting for the doctor to tell me that my CT scan says there are no signs of cancer left.

Love truly exists and I've been lucky to be with her for 13 years. Thank you, Allison!
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Glad you're back in the saddle, Horse, and kicked cancer with your 2 good legs!
And that you're with such a fine mare!!!
 
Just to clear up my Tom Hanks reference: I'm not suggesting I impersonate Tom Hanks. I mean to do romantic gestures and kind of go all in for this one girl. It's well past a "getting to know you" phase, and I've been very much my real self all along.
 
Drew Ott said:
I'm not suggesting I impersonate Tom Hanks.
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i've got to be honest. the idea of you impersonating a young tom hanks by putting on a dress, pretending to be a woman, and moving into her low rent apartment building.. seemed like a huge time commitment to me. and there is no guarantee it would have worked.
 
ugafan said:
i've got to be honest. the idea of you impersonating a young tom hanks by putting on a dress, pretending to be a woman, and moving into her low rent apartment building.. seemed like a huge time commitment to me. and there is no guarantee it would have worked.
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I'm absolutely positive 'impersonating a woman' would not go over with any young woman outside of a scripted romcom. While things may have changed some since I was a 'young man', but women always struck me as very conservative in regard to such things...
 
I think HorseFilms account is good supporting evidence for the answer to the question of love existing. When people love each other, stories like that happen.

I am grateful for your contributions here and am praying for you HorseFilms.

Another thing I forgot to mention earlier, is Drew Ott mentioned having to go through some crazy things in order for the relationship to have a shot.
I recommend being cautious here.

Barriers against a relationship can make us want them more.
For instance, if distance separates people, they think they want each other more. It affects our perception.
If the other person is presently in a loveless, abusive relationship we might want to "rescue them" and it makes us feel like we are madly in love.
So when I counsel people and either of those factors are present, one question I raise is how do you feel about them when the factor is removed?

I learned a long time ago, we want it more when we can't have it, whether it's material things or people. I've seen this hundreds upon hundreds of times.

I'm speaking generally and not saying this is the specific case here. Just trying to offer a bit of info that might help.

Another person mentioned the capacity to love is required and that is true. There's only one that can change the heart and then a person truly has the capacity to love and forgive.
 
We are heavily in pre-pro on a project about similar issues - not beginning of love as in your case but rather its endings (and potentials after). We took as an axiom that love does exist, but wondered if indeed it does and is so overpowering as we came to believe (and often understand personally experienced) then what happens when that love dissolves? Is it possible to love again? And if so, will that new love be as pure as the one left behind. Thus we send two people - our characters - who did experience love in each respective relationships on a small adventure where they try to resolve this question. They find that to tackle this problem they first need to define what it means to be a woman and a man and how one can define self.

So based on our research, here are a few notes:
a.) The fact that a couple stays together for years doesn't mean they've found love. Majority of people are conformists so their longevity could imply their attachment to the comfort of companionship.
b.) One of the biggest dangers to love is people's inclination for sentimentality: they long for this fantastic feeling -the butterflies in the stomach - they remember from the beginnings of their affair. Many can't accept that love is a complex emotion made up of many components. The initial butterflies in one's stomach, with time, evolve into something totally different. In that time people, by definition, change and the feeling changes as well. So it's very rare that the changed people and the changed love still match. In essence Love is made up of 3 crucial pillars: physical desire (i want you because i like the way you look); intellectual desire (i want you because i like your vibe, mind, outlook on life); time desire (i can see my life with your for many years to come - the proverbial "until death do as part"). As the love changes, those pillars shake... What's fascinating is how crucial the pillar of time is in our perception of love. Soon you ask yourself "i should be with this one person forever?" or "i should only sleep with this one person?". A natural conflict occurs and people try to resolve it somehow. Sometimes the natural resolution is a split, sometimes it's revisiting the definitions and rebuilding that which thinking about time takes away.
c.) There is NO real you. You are an amalgamation of forces much more powerful then you that shaped who you are today. (The society, the times we live in, the environment, our economic position, education, intelligence, willingness to work hard, our skepticism and intellect, our physical appearance.... Those are just a few of many, many factors that shape where we stand today.) Very little of what you desire, think, want and care about has to do with the real you. You would have to search very hard and deep to discover who you really are. When people search for some higher meaning, in essence they are trying to discover self by discovering something big and meaningful outside of self. As such the advice about just being yourself is false. We are all caricatures of a kind in search for other caricatures. When people speak of finding their soulmate - they talk about meeting someone who is equal in her/his search for the self or acceptance of impossibility of such search. For instance if you just accept that you don't know who you are and meet your soulmate, you can, through mutual conversations, discover some morsels of truth about one another. Or if your pretend that you are yourself (a false statement) and meet your soulmate that also makes such a false statement then you can live in certain state of happiness as the truth is not something that really matters to one or the other.
d.) Men and women comprehend the world totally differently. Man wants to love, woman wants to be loved. Man is about finding someone he can start loving, for women it's being found by the man who can love her. The criteria for man to start loving and woman to accept being loved are different too - the very quality that attracts you in the other probably has very little resonance with the object of your desire. For instance search for absolute truth (see point C) might be important to you but for a woman only relative truth might matter. Both are searching for certainty, but the time plays a factor - one wants "forever" while the other wants it "now".
 
Love comes in many flavors. Friends, family, video equipment. To be loved is probably more complicated than loving. Like DroveChuck said, get to know that person, because while love may transcend logic (and does), it cannot transcend communication. Nora Ephron got inspiration somewhere but those are just moments where it "worked" and not the whole story. They didn't show the part after the end of Sleepless in Seattle when they get out of the elevator in the middle of NY and actually started talking, you know? We're just hoping it worked out! This is coming from a romantic.
 
DPStewart said:
Oh love exists alright.
It's all over the place.
It can and will rise up within you in different ways and at different times.

Love is a verb. You're supposed to do it. Show it. Feel it. Not just sit around thinking about it.

No two people will love each other in exactly the same way. There are as many different variations on the expression of love as there are people loving.

But people are a difficult species... trust is a *****.
By its very definition, the deeper you love the more you expose yourself to potentially crushing pain. But the only way to avoid the pain is not to love - and that is no solution at all.
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I really like this reply. Thanks.
 
ZazaCast said:
This is a question that everyone asks themselves at least once during a lifetime....kind of like the "why are we here?" question.
Having lived for over 50 years (and been through some serious stuff in those years), I've asked myself that same question MANY times.
LOVE & TRUST are two completely different things, yes they go hand in hand, but I've found that I can love someone and not trust them at all...and I can trust someone, but not love them.
I have the biggest problem with trust...once you lose that...or never find it in the first place, loving that same person (in a complete way) becomes impossible. (divorce can do that to ya)

Example; I had given up on 'love' and came to the conclusion that I would be alone for the rest of my life....then, out of the blue, I reconnect with a high school crush (turns out she had a crush on me too).
We've been together for just about a year now and things are great. Now if she would just get rid of that husband, we'd be all set! (I kid...I Kid...):huh:

That said, you haven't lived if you haven't felt the deepest, darkest pain...as well as the endless bliss of Love & Trust!

Remember, we come into the world alone...and we leave alone (everyone dies their own death)...just love yourself and love will find you. Life is short, enjoy it! :)
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I hear you on the love/trust thing. Once you have your childlike, naive trust ripped away, it's hard to get it back. It takes much more time and effort to slowly build trust with a person. But I guess that's the only kind of trust there really ever was. I'm glad to hear you've found someone again.
 
Patryk_Rebisz said:
d.) Men and women comprehend the world totally differently. Man wants to love, woman wants to be loved. Man is about finding someone he can start loving, for women it's being found by the man who can love her. The criteria for man to start loving and woman to accept being loved are different too - the very quality that attracts you in the other probably has very little resonance with the object of your desire. For instance search for absolute truth (see point C) might be important to you but for a woman only relative truth might matter. Both are searching for certainty, but the time plays a factor - one wants "forever" while the other wants it "now".
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Really interesting post overall. Your film sounds great.

I found b.) especially interesting, the bit about the "time" pillar. This also makes sense in my personal experience. A lot of religions focus on the infinite and the eternal in love, the idea that love is only supposed to exist between people who will be together eternally. If you don't see your significant other as someone you could be with forever, you probably don't love them. Mormons refer to their husband or wife as their "eternal companion," and really believe in an afterlife that lasts for eternity with all their family.

But my question is with d.) -- your statement that men and women comprehend the world totally differently. I actually believe this too, but I'm curious to hear how you might justify that position. Usually you hear this kind of statement justified by evolutionary psychology, but it sounds like you're coming at it from a different perspective.

edited to add-- I'm not Mormon but I spent a week living with college aged Mormons in Utah a few years ago.
 
Another piece of advice I heard is: a good foundation for marriage is a solid friendship.

Think of the traits that you would want in a friend. Most people say things like: trust, respect, honesty, responsibility, sense of humor, common interests, common values. Now which of these can you take away when you add physical involvement?

A time bomb is planted when you're deeply in love but not really good friends first. Consciously or unconsciously you lower your standards because the person is so good looking, your brain chemicals are so intoxicating, and so forth. But one day all that will wear off.
 
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combatentropy said:
Another piece of advice I heard is: a good foundation for marriage is a solid friendship.

Think of the traits that you would want in a friend. Most people say things like: trust, respect, honesty, responsibility, sense of humor, common interests, common values. Now which of these can you take away when you add physical involvement?

A time bomb is planted when you're deeply in love but not really good friends first. Consciously or unconsciously you lower your standards because the person is so good looking, your brain chemicals are so intoxicating, and so forth. But one day all that will wear off.
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Time bomb indeed. Yeah I finally feel like I'm learning this. The girl in question is the really good friend, which is a good sign that I'm maturing. Slowly but surely.
 
There is some interesting research out there about attraction. For example, women can smell a man's immunity and are attracted to a man whose immunity is different from hers. The test - women were asked to smell men's shirts. The results were that they liked the smell of the shirts of the men with the diverse immunity. There was a second study done where they did not smell the man's shirt but were simply asked which man standing in front of them was attractive. It had the same results. It's fascinating stuff.
 
Paul F said:
The test - women were asked to smell men's shirts. The results were that they liked the smell of the shirts of the men with the diverse immunity. There was a second study done where they did not smell the man's shirt but were simply asked which man standing in front of them was attractive. It had the same results.
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I had always attributed my dating misfortune to subpar looks and lack of social skills. It's interesting to hear it may actually be due to my smell.
 
ugafan said:
I had always attributed my dating misfortune to subpar looks and lack of social skills. It's interesting to hear it may actually be due to my smell.
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Back in the olden days you could meet your future wife in a darkroom filled with devloper/fixer fumes which might cover any 'untoward' odors you body may produce...

One of the RomCom tropes of a 'nerd' getting the 'hot chick' is so hopelessly false... now that 'same sex' relationships are more accepted, perhaps such a trope would 'work' for such, but 'het nerd'... no way in general...
 
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