Is love even real?

I don't know. Especially now, as I am in the same boat. My love left me several
Months ago, under very difficult circumstances, I was very ill physically and she began dating my friend, breaking a specific promise to me. It was the truest love I have known, yet it may have been an illusion. I still love her lots but don't think I can forgive and repair, even if she becomes willing. We thought we were soul mates, we firmly believe we are both empaths with a strong emotional connection, and always able to know what the other was thinking.

The thoughts posted so far have been very helpful to me, clearly defining two primary answers; yes but its rare, and no its brain chemistry and bio trickery, an evolutionary reproductive mechanism. I have always believed the latter primarily, and I'm still sure the chemicals and gray matter are a big part of the answer. I also believe in the soul, and that it can express a deeper love. But without any proof I have no strong argument for it.

I suppose I think then, love is a biological function during the initial lust honeymoon phase, but a spiritual love can evolve between souls, and can span lifetimes or eternity. Unless the soul is the illusion.

a reply to: Pylgrym
It is very hard when you are young to understand grown-up Love, that is what mother used to tell me. I am well into my Old Fart panties, and I still have trouble with the particulars, but it is much easier for me to recognize what it is not.

"I love you", are probably some of the first words you were presented with on your day of birth, and one of the first emotions you could identify as a child. As a child you learned that love was supposed to be a good thing. You wanted everything in life to be good, so you were supposed to love everything and everybody.

Then you started the maturation process and real life came on the scene. You were taught there are different kinds of love and there were numerous qualifiers for love. As if your hormones were not causing you enough confusion and complications, your trusty friendly emotion Love, had to change into something that was constantly morphing and racing in and out of revolving doors.

Love is used to describe almost every halfway, positive feeling you experience. Hate is a word that is also used often to cover a wide range of negative feelings. They are both generic placeholders, that do a good job of explaining to others, what you are feeling, but both words can be very poor descriptors for what you are actually feeling deep down inside.

Love and Hate are emotions that are not easy sometimes to examine up close, and are frequently avoided, except on a very superficial level. Taking that journey into the deep, can expose the lies that we tell ourselves for a multitude of reasons.

Love is not always a comfortable feeling and it is not always welcomed when it decides to visit. Love is very difficult to control, if it can be controlled at all. It doesn't have qualifiers. It can be painful, embarrassing and relentless, when it is trying to be controlled or if it is incorrectly identified.

Think of love and lust as being as similar as a corn snake and a coral snake and you will understand why incorrectly identifying the two, can turn into something extremely problematic.

a reply to: TechniXcality

Is love even real?

Yes, it is but it requires a genuine experience for understanding.

May I suggest a steak at Outback? Medium rare?

MMM-mmm! Nothing NOT to love!

a reply to: TechniXcality

Life can be #ty... but odd unexpected moments can also
be very sweet.

Having had experience of loss and rejection myself..
my advice to you is do what makes you happy.. and above all else
be yourself and stay true to yourself.

You won't find love .. love will find you.

In the meantime enjoy the Intertubez

it's real aright but elusive and, in it's purest form, not common. it's all you need.

a reply to: TechniXcality
Wow! Thank you, you made me register after 4 years!! Good Job!!!

Love... is it real?

As a former villian and demon I can say hands down, without a doubt, LOVE is real.
As a drug addict I wandered through this reality as an insane person, not caring where I went or what I did, as long as I was "high". I could care less for anyone or anything, and yet... I loved. I hated my father and yet, I loved him. I hated life and yet, i loved life. I was confused, alone, angry, scared, scarred, a hero and a victum, but I loved?

As I nearly died multiple times and each time rebirthed my self as something a little more "human", a little more able, a little more capable of love.

In the 6 or so lifetimes I have been given, killing off the former, discarding what did not work, embracing hope and the LOVE of this universe/God, I am becoming a person that understands things I could not have understood just 10 years ago.

Love is not convenient, it is not for you to decide, it is what makes me realize there is more going on inside of me than just programming and chemical reactions. For me love is the goal, it is true enlightenment, there is no greater compliment that can be paid than "I love you". such a simple phrase, such a powerful statement.

When i held my child the first time, i KNEW love was real, I didn't wonder, think or believe, I KNEW IT WAS REAL!
I would die for this thing, apart from me, made from me, and I, the demon, the piece of crap that crawled out of darkness, am able to love my children.

It's not like, and it's not lust, it is it's own magical wonderful thing, it is a feeling, an emotion and a reaction, it is truely all powerful and maybe it is the connecting thread to all things in this universe.

But when you speak of love as something that happens between 2 things or more, it gets exponentially complicated.
You loved your wife, she fell in love with escaping, that is not your fault, but it appears to be what has happened.
To properly connect with love as the foundation, all parties must enter with love as the reason for the union.
I have lost, and lost and lost, and continue to lose, but I still get up one more time than I get knocked down... why? LOVE!

Having been through a world of pain with no love, I can honestly say that coming into a world of love is truely wonderful. i think I am better for having experienced the darkness, because stepping into the light of love is that much more awesome!

love is the reason I open doors for strangers, carry groceries for the elderly, shovel driveways and mow lawns. Did i have to do it? NO. I did it because I love the human race and honestly believe that if I strive to love life and live it to the best of my abilites, the universe will be a better place, that i will have made things a little bit better than they were before I walked here. And i LOVE thinking that!

So get back up, find your loves in life, and pull in the new things that will make you LOVE again, even stronger than you ever have before!

a reply to: curiouspatience

You did a good job of explaining the explainable.

When i held my child the first time, i KNEW love was real, I didn't wonder, think or believe, I KNEW IT WAS REAL!

Excellent example of Love; that power that overwhelms you without bidding.

The inner amazement on recognition of that elusive and mystical sensation, that you have spent your life trying to define. The mild puzzlement and sadness you feel, when you realize that you where looking for it in all the wrong places, and that the sensation is so ridiculously mellow, yet so absolute, mind numbing, and heart exploding, all at the same time. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, and usually end up doing both.

It's not like, and it's not lust, it is it's own magical wonderful thing, it is a feeling, an emotion and a reaction, it is truely all powerful and maybe it is the connecting thread to all things in this universe.

I think you have hit the nail on the head with this single observation.

I think the strongest bond is a parent and child. That is true love.

Anything out of that might be "love" but it's a lot more fragile.

a reply to: IridiumFlareMadness

Everything we perceive is a chemical, or magnetic and electrical reaction. Emotions are the same, but it doesn't make them any less real. True love, and being in love is hard to find these days.

Most people these days simply resort to lust, and not love. So there is confusion as to what love is. But it does exist. It's just harder and harder to find it, because a lot of people have decided for the easier side which is simply lust.

These days there are also more divorces, because people use a lot of excuses. Some are valid such as getting out of a violent relationship. Other people divorce simply based on wanting more, and not necessarily on love.

There is love and people who are seeking it, but it is harder and harder to find those people. Most simply settle with lust.

a reply to: TechniXcality
Likely you have been bitten by the love bug. What I mean by that is a preconditioned picture of what you thought love would be. In today's world love or that word has been used in so many tings that I think for people, I love cake, I love icecream, I love Sunday nights lights, etc and so on.

And you being immersed in the hype and hoopla 24/7 even from when a kid, to say its over saturated would be putting it lightly. Your raised to expect something big and something magical, but at the end of the day, two people find each other. True love, white picket fence, the whole thing.

For the most part in today's age love is 40%hype, 20%a sales pitch, 20% something that got blown over proportion, 10% circumstances and such, and the other 10% learning all the above. So your former wife left you and took you for an emotional ride? # happens. And judging by your post, you probably should have seen it coming.

Consider yourself lucky she left you and keep on trucking. There are many people out there who were not so lucky, and still have to carry and drag that on for a long time yet. And even others who have not even got to that point. Poor fools, let them enjoy there makebelieves.

I just am not sure romantic love is even real. So what do you think, is romantic love real, or is it a "magical" pleasantly developed by a social animal to help reproduce?

Its a game. And the masquerade of loneliness. Its basically why when you put a bone in your dogs bowl he takes it out and digs it somewhere or drags it all over the yard before chewing on it, just adding spices to the bone ya know. Poor dog just wants to spice up and play with his meal a bit.

Its why humans put ketchup on there hamburgers, none of it is real, its all a matter of taste. The whole romantic love was created to spice things up, after all. But at the end of the day your are dealing with merely a sophisticated more or less tame animal called humanity. Its not even to help reproduce, as nothing society or anybody would do would stop people from #ing. On the reproduction part its a given that as long as things remain within bounds, like will attract like, or birds of a feather, its guaranteed to happen, its a practical certainty. And the whole romantic love its merely just there to add flavor to what is already going to happen.


Though for some its like ingesting a constant diet of sugar, which again is not good for you, so don't wonder why your feeling dizzy and light headed or broke a arm trying to lift a library book, its because its not sustenance its just hype and sweets, and its bad for you in large dosses day in and day out... Get it.

But for the most part this whole romantic love thing, its just ketchup on hamburgers. But who these days even has time for that nonsense.

a reply to: curiouspatience
Oh wow! Its a good thing that you stopped your demoning ways as demons and villains are annoying as hell. In fact much more so. But I think this is more of a general that the OP is trying to fit the triangle into the square hole. You know, sometimes it just does not work, and you got to quit and move on instead of becoming more infatuated and more engrossed into something which may not really be there.

There is really nothing more to say or do on it but move on. I am quite sure he will find somebody and such etc etc, it almost seems like we all have to go through something in order to find ourselfs, not so much in finding others, as for the most part that is just a mental projection we or others have put up, its more a mental roadblock in such cases, then it would be a roadmap.

I don't usually provide a reading into someone's personal nature...

But perhaps love for you in an intimate sense is not real...

I say this because you don't love yourself... You live in the past... and are jaded by your experiences...

You must let go of the past it does haunt you and pre occupies your mind far to much...

You must be willing to let go take down your wall learn once more to accept yourself to forgive yourself then to love yourself then you will be able to take a chance unafraid of the pain you perceive to be an unavoidable circumstance of even trying to love...

Surely love is real... and you would love to love again...and this truthfully answers your own question...

I thought I would add that pride in oneself does not equate to loving yourself and you are more filled with fear than pride...

Well my thought is is that usually one person loves the other more than the other does. So sometimes one person is in love, the other is in like or lust. Eventually the lesser starts to get some romantic bonds but they're not as deep. So in a breakup the one deeply in love gets hurt really bad.

As for couples and relationships, well marriage use to be a strong healthy vibrant part of society. But like everything else, tptb cooped it, and preverted it to use as a way to wreck society. Marriage was very healthy until about maybe 40 years ago. Then it started to go downhill. Now tptb just use it as a big money making scheme. Both to enslave people, and to make more money off them when they divorce.

Like any big institution you can think of in society has been infiltrated and preverted by tptb. From edu. to marriage, to legal system, to food, healthcare etc etc etc.

But you shouldn't let one event ruine your life. It's easy to fall into that trap. I'd try and stay positive and just keep dating. There's lots of fish in the sea. I use to fall in love all the time. Ahhh that was great, those were the days. Now it's so much harder because the girl has to be around for like at least a year before I'll even consider it anything. It would be nice to fall in love again. Eventually you just get to that point where love isn't such a big deal anymore. Real not real who knows. I'd rather find love than just sex though. It's hard to find. Even harder to find mutual love.

a reply to: TechniXcality

Well since you asked, I've seen this often with people who
don't believe God exists. Sooner or later they find they have
to start eliminating other parts of life to maintain their disbelief.
And more often than not love is usually first in line. I literally had
a member here years ago tell me, " Well than love doesn't exist
either " when he had no way out of a heated debate we were in.
Except to say that.

Jesus loves you dude.

a reply to: NightSkyeB4Dawn

Yes. This is the caveat of Human Love. You nailed it on the head. Thank you for being the only person in this thread that gets it

love is real as long as the two people who agree and is committed believe in it. if they do, then there will never be evident that it doesn't.

a reply to: TechniXcality

Sorry to hear about your troubles TechniXcality.

Yes, I can not only tell you, glibly, or with philosophy, that love is real. But I can give you a scientific reconstruction of our own species evolution to actually prove, logically, that love not only exists, but is the very substratum of consciousness.

I will argue, quite simply, and perhaps a tad esoterically, that consciousness is created by "moments of recognition", whereby the mind of one organism "senses it self" in the externalized cues in the behavior of the other. We barely notice this, but it is this very unconscious responsivity of the body to non-verbal relational cues that indicates the "sympathetic" tension between individual human minds.

Just ask yourself: what do I care about more? What someone says, or how they say it? If you're asking someone for something, would you prefer a response that seems reluctant or is full of non-verbal violence (irritation, passive aggression) or a response that sympathizes with your own affective (feeling) state? Inside, everyone knows that they care what other people think about them; so much so, that we know, instinctively, what to do to avoid thinking about painful things.

On to a scientific explanation. Somewhere between Australopithecus Africanus and Homo Erectus began a feedback loop very different from others in the natural world.

I like to think of human beings as being most like insects in their social organization. It isn't immediately apparent, inasmuch as we look somewhat like apes in body-plan, but human behavior is coordinated in a way that can only be properly compared to insects like ants, bees and termites. So this is what you need to keep in mind: just as ants coordinate their activity with reference to the "whole" of a particular ant colony, so too do humans define their experience in terms of their immediate relations in their social world. Thus, we can say that humans constitute a "group organism", as the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued (as a way to explain the existence of altruism) evolution.binghamton.edu....

This is all actually very simply to understand. Each organism, such as an ant or a human, is programmed to "respond to" certain environmental stimuli; thus, the genes which exist within the organism are "entrained" to the dynamic operating between each member of the group. For some reason, biological life has preferred to combine itself; first, with the symbiosis between a bacteria and a archea that created the nucleated cell; then cells came together and became a larger organism, whose functions were defined by the level of organism. Then some individuals of these organisms combined to become a "super-organism", coordinated in their behavior in pursuit of a commonly shared goal (i.e beehive, ant hill, termite mound) such as the collective activity we humans call "society".

First thing to notice is that life seems to prefer connection and more complex organization. In us humans, we falsely imagine that our "relatedness" is merely biological. The thing about the human brain-mind, is that each humans consciousness is shaped like puddy by the interacted with non-verbal environment. Even before birth, the stress response system of the brain is being shaped by surrounding cortisol levels in the mothers body, so that the quality of a mothers emotional does indeed have determinative effects on the construction of her childs reactivity level: it is, after all, just like other processes in evolution: predictive. The developing body is preparing to enter a world; and the world to be entered is either one way (safe, responsive) or another (threatening). Our biology is thus pre-programmed toward a certain level of responsivity to the world as determined by the mothers experiences during pregnancy, as well as the extended genetic history of nervous systems in her own family history. Imagine a "frame within a frame". The past enfolded into the genetic present. The nervous systsem is turning out to be VERY different from what genetic determinists have thought; ones "sensitivity" is something entirely 'attuned' to the vagaries of external circumstances. And why shouldn't this be the case, given all the knowledge amassed from psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and psychiatry, about the needs of human beings?

So, were a big social organism, or a "super-organism". But it isn't very apparent, why? Well, we evolved FROM apes, and so have retained the "shame-pride" continuum that was the earlier regulatory factor in ape evolution. When homo erectus evolved, the brain had ballooned to 600 cc's. How? Well, as far as I'm concerned, empirical evidence from psychotherapy and developmental psychology indicate that "safe-relationships", defined as communicative styles of mutual concern and care for the other, reflected in facial expressions, body movement, and vocal tone, both GROWS the brain, as in secure vs. insecure attachments, as well as stimulates neurogenesis, as volume estimates of white and grey matter before and after psychotherapy show (such as for trauma disorders).

Thus, as far as I am concerned, LOVE = Neural development. When we experience sympathetic emotions - from compassion, to play, to mutual interests - our brain is stimulated to grow.

Thus, the transition we see from homo erectus to homo heidelbergenesis is an evolution of an ape-species into a mimetically organized super-organism, still partially under the influence of a shame-pride continuum, but now inclining more and more towards states of sympathetic engagements, in body, but also, at the same time, in mind, in affective experience, and in meanings.

I have postulated "micro moments of recognition" as the atomic structures of mind-brain growth. The more and more this happened, the more and more complex human-human interactions became. Mind you, I am talking about the internal side of the picture, whereas the psychologist Michael Tomasello carves out the external side, with humans engaging in the day to day needs of survival. Survival in humans was about coming to a state of "shared-intentionality", which means that each human had a phenomenological experience that inclined him towards "common agreement" in perception; indeed, affective processes act as the 'background', which attentional awareness is guided by. By inducing shame at certain times, pride at other times, hubris can be controlled. However, seeing someone sick, ill, shamed, or vulnerable, also inspires compassion, so compassion became tethered to an empathetic genetic attunment to other peoples affective expressions.

12,000 years ago, with the start of agriculture, mankind began to amass land, which was psyhologically experiences as an increase in "self" i.e. pride. Hubris grew as technical prowess and the force of utility began to displace the underlying mimetic sympathy that stabilized "recognition of anothers emotions" in fair and equal communities.

a reply to: TechniXcality

a reply to: NightSkyeB4Dawn
Beautifully written and emotionally exacting. I know love is real and lasting. Although divorced I am still in love with him; faults and all and it takes alot to admit that especially considering how awful he was. I have moved on but to deny being "in love" would be a lie. There is nothing else like it and do hope to find it again. The heart wants what the heart wants; there's no denying it.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Sounds like starting with belief and forming a bunch of hoopla around science. You're mostly describing instinct, but choosing to focus on the bits that could surround your own definition of "love". I don't know why you have such a need for this.

I don't see love as anything more than an ideal not ever truly realized.