Life repeats itself again...and again...

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-22-2007
Life repeats itself again...and again...
9
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 7:38am

What is the point of being in a relationship...or loving somebody...what's the point of that 'love like you've never been hurt'.Love is nature's big scam. Lots of raging hormones, chemistry writing a story, visions of cinematic romance in your head. I was on this board 2 yrs ago and i'm back again. Thanks to time, good friends and lots of writing i healed, met new guys, had fun and wham, love hit me all over again. I started liking this guy i haven't even liked at first...haven't liked the way he looks, dresses, talks. And we started hanging out and out of nowhere it creeped up on me. But, just as two years ago it was a matter of a long distance relationship, now it is a matter of oh so many things: i'm an atheist he's religious and im pretty sure he would never be in a serious relationship with somebody that doesn't share his views on God etc. He is not interested in being in a serious relationship as once he nicely put it 'i dont date i s****'. finally, i have vested much more time and emotions then he has in this little thing i can't even call a relationship. I see him 3,4 days per week but basically have no rights. If something happened to him I wouldn't even know as he works in my city but actually has all his family in a neighbouring country so I would probably never find out as I don't know any of them, or friends. And all this after only cca 2 months of knowing eachother. Do i have a problem? Yea i do..I'm emotional and get attached to a freaking snail on the road as I get scared he will get run down by a car let alone somebody im having sex with. Am i going through a rough patch in life and need a guy to hold me to feel like everything will be allright? Yes and yes. Should i loosen up and go with the flow? Yea, we should all be a lot more easy going. Despite all this, despite the shortness of this fling,the life facts, the experience, I still can't get away from this uneasy feeling that romantic love is a trap, a disease that really ultimately kills you. I was brought up on fairytales and 80's movies like the goonies and the pretty woman where everything in the end ends up being dandy. I am 25 know and for each year i've lived i can give you at least one horrid experience somebody i know had. People get disappointed left and right, hurt, alone, empty...a friend's parents have been married for 25 years and when you see them together you can only feel depressed. Two days ago, on our way to the mall, he said to his wife smth like ' c'mon the only ppl that stay together for this long are those that can't afford to divorce or have a kid, like us'. My friend's mom laughed it off. A friend's girlfriend left him a month ago. He thought they'll get married this summer, everything had been planned already. She just said 'you disgust me'. sent it in a text message. 4 years ago I broke up with a guy that was madly in love with me and asked me to marry him. I said yes, took the ring, wore it for 2 months and then left him. Who does that?? I even liked him as a person but was never in love with him even though i repeatedly said i love you. I just fell out of love with him.Just like that.
What I'm saying is, there's no hope. And hope is such an intricate thing. And we can't fight it. It's in you, you were conditioned for it. Just as I hope this guy will come to me and say, hey i think i love you, you are hoping your next relationship will be better. It might..you'll get over this person as we all have in the past, you'll meet somebody new, start thinking that it finally happened, you finally met your soulmate and then slam, somebody meets somebody new.

yea, i wish i was less cynical but if you let your head do the thinking and sum up all of the experiences either you had or somebody you know had you get love=one big scam

Edited 5/22/2007 7:43 am ET by xnikolinax




Edited 5/22/2007 7:51 am ET by xnikolinax
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-22-2007
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 8:16am

Dear xnikolinax,

I know what you mean. These days it's difficult to see the kind of love you see in the movies. The everlasting, fun forever love. Too many couples walk away from each other too easily. The stresses of everyday life are not condusive to falling in love and staying in love. The internet has offered a "safe" place to cheat, meet someone new and fall in love all over again. I recently split with a man who cheated on me daily via the internet. He said these women were just his friends but lo and behold, he has traveled to meet up with them and have sex. He has recently fallen for a sweet woman in another country, claims he is in love with her. She's significantly younger than him and is a single mother. I highly doubt she is aware of the women he is currently sleeping with and travelling to meet up with. A part of me wants to share this with her to save her any forseeable pain and sufferring but the reality is, it's none of my buisness and perhaps she is alright with this behaviour. A leopard does not change its' spots darling and we as women must ask ourselves these questions. "Do we choose these men?" "Do we allow them to choose us?" "What behaviours can we change to attract the good ones?".
I have had some very good and healthy relationships, they did not work for whatever reasons but I can remember them fondly.

The beauty of the die hard romantic is he/she never loses hope.
Hope is gold. Hold fast to it and learn from your past to build what dreams are made of in your future.

All the best!

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-24-2005
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 10:04am

>>A leopard does not change its' spots darling and we as women must ask ourselves these questions. "Do we choose these men?" "Do we allow them to choose us?" "What behaviours can we change to attract the good ones<<

Sweetener...you couldn't be more spot on. If we look back at all our relationships that failed, we will find the one common thread...US!

We draw in relationships and there's something we are putting out there that attracts a certain type. Until we've got that figured out, our history will keep on repeating itself.

Good insight, sweetener

clarity


iVillage Member
Registered: 02-05-2007
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 2:17pm

Hi xnikolinax,


I truly believe 'like attracts like' and until we clean up our own thinking, our own arena, our own attitudes and views, things pretty much will repeat themselves, over and over and over again.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-22-2007
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 7:22pm
I don't think I am necesarily resentful or bitter. I think of myself as a realist. What exactly do you have hope for? The hope we all have is the hope that elevates from our views on what perfect love should be. We know what it should look like, feel like, smell like, taste like...or do we. Is it maybe just an illusion, a label we have put on chemical reactions in our body in order to make them more profound, deep, less animalistic and more human like..? Reality is that even the happy couples are less happy behind closed doors. How many truly happy couples do you all know? I know none. The people 'i know that are in relationships are in them because of habit, convenience, loneliness, easy access of sex etc. None of them (those that have been together for more then 3years) are still together because they still have profound love for eachother. Yes, I am sure it happens sometimes somewhere to someone but it is so rare that regardless of whether you hope for it or not ,statistically it's almost extinct and not a rule in love but rather a glitch, an exception. Once we all realize this we will not go for the guys/girls we have butterflies with but for those that we get along with, can be friends with, that can cook, have money, whatever. But never that pure love we all wanna hope for. And even when we get that pure exstatic blissfull feeling of being in love we treat the other so nicely so that they finally use, cheat, whatever.. and leave. Why? Because it is in human nature to want what we can't have..it is in the hunt, the adrenaline, fascination with anything new. And it is in the nature of the relationship for one person to always love the other more. It is always true.One always loves more. SInce there isn't a balance one will always feel like they have conqured and the other will always feel inadequate and search for approval.Nobody's satisfied, history repeats itself, a broken heart and one of us trying to breathe just to survive
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-05-2007
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 7:28pm

:: How many truly happy couples do you all know? I know none.


That's because that is where your focus is.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-12-2007
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 7:43pm
How do you change your thinking? What should you do to change that pattern? I think I have the same pattern in my relationships. How can I change it? Any idea?
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-05-2007
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 8:02pm

For me personally, it was about relationship weeding.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-22-2006
Tue, 05-22-2007 - 11:55pm

I'm completely with Carrie on this, you're attracting what you've focused on. I'm a realist as well, however, my reality is that people who make an effort at their relationships, and I mean truly make an effort, succeed at them. Teh ones who don't, simply won't. My best role model is my parents. Next month they celebrate 41 years married, and they're quite in love. Not just companionate love, although they are a team, a true force to be reckoned with, but they still get those stars in their eyes when they look at each other sometimes. So that's what I know. I also see other couples who are happily married over several years, more than ten, some past fifteen.

Whether you personally see it or not, what you're projecting out to the world IS, in fact, bitterness. Even if that's not what you feel or intend, that's what I felt when I read your post, was your complete disillusionment with relationships and love in general, and how sad is that, because there really is no higher purpose in life than to love. So you are choosing to miss the boat in life. You call it realism, I see it as pure negativity. Your post, to be honest, I had to take in small doses because it was so thoroughly negative and depressive. Negative thoughts and beliefs will *not* bring you a happy love, the two don't go hand-in-hand. I mean, think about it, does that even begin to make sense? You want to have a happy relationship, first you have to be happy. It doesn't work the other way around, don't kid yourself and don't try to kid others. Negative vibes, negative attitude create a negative reality for you.

Like begets like. You want happy, be happy. You want angry, stay angry. You want love, be love.

Statistically, people get in and out of love relationships for all the wrong reasons, because they had a need that they wanted met, and damn to those who had a need themselves, because it's "all about me." How many times on these boards does someone say, "what about your needs, get your needs met," completely forgetting the other person has valid needs of thier own. No, love isn't about how much love we can get, which is where you're coming from, but rather, how much love we can GIVE. Unless you have it to give, you won't have it at all, and then one finds themselves in the situation you're in, unhappy, unsatisfied, and yes, verging on bitterness, and how attractive is that?

By attractive, think about the word attractive or attraction, it means to cause something to draw near to you, so if a person is being angry, sad, depressed, skeptical, cynical, guess what they'll draw near? Not people like Carrie, not people like me, not a great many others who want to only draw in positive and loving people. Positive and loving people have what, positive and loving relationships.

All of what you've erroneously equated to love is simple lust. It is. That stuff is had a dime a dozen. Some people will say they won't live without that, well, to them I say have a good time continuously chasing down the next "high" because that's all you'll ever have. It's because of this completely mixed-up belief that's been fed by too many romance comedies and too many fairy tales that the basis of love is the thrill, the chase, the adrenaline rush, that the divorce rate, not to mention rampant commitment problems, are as high as they are. No one even knows how to give of themselves anymore without expecting something in return, especially from those they claim to love.

...Get yourself a book, it's called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Read it and underline it.
...Also get yourself the book The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer. Read it twice and underline it, bookmark it, keep it by your bed.
...Then get a third one by Ariel and Shya Kane called Creating Magical Relationships and don't let it out of your sight.
...Read The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.
...Read Kabbalah on Love by Yehuda Berg
...The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
...The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra
...Start attending seminars or read books by James Arthur Ray.

If these powerhouses together cannot sway you, I'm not sure what can, and then it's going to be very sad indeed.

All the best in your search for love. Here's a hint, look within yourself, there's a whole universe of it within you.

Good Luck,

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iVillage Member
Registered: 05-22-2007
Wed, 05-23-2007 - 5:06am

I wouldn't say I am disillusioned with love in general. I am a very upbeat person, have a big circle of friends that I love dearly, a family I enjoy. I volunteer with the red cross, have a dog and a cat. My parents have been together for 28 years, my grandparents for 50. They each rarely fight and still enjoy eachothers company. My life is filled with love if you will. Altogether I had about 5 relationships and only two (which is still not a prevailing majority) were somewhat unsuccessful but never extremely dramatic. It is not love I am attacking here really, I should have made that clearer. What I am attacking are the relationships, today's patterns of thinking. For those 5 couples that one of you mentioned you saw on a hiking trip I can give you 20 horrid stories of how people's hearts were broken. I do not necesarily focus on that beacuse as I mentioned my love life (relationship wise) has a passing grade but I hear these stories from my close friends. Either they go through calvaries or their friends do. My best friend was with a guy for three years. I saw them together. They were truly in love, when he looked at her you could see that he is just transfixed. He told her he loved her 2 yrs and 9 months into their relationship..he said 'I love you I want to marry you and have kids yith you'. 2 years and 10 months later he slept with another girl and told my friend he is disgusted by her and can not live the lie anymore.
I have a cousin that is not great looking. Honestly, she is unfortunately quite unattractive. A great great person though. She is 18 and going through the toughest time because when she goes out all her friends have guys coming to them except her. She has a good guy friend that is quite attractive. Great person as well. She fell in love with him and even though they remained good friends he basically said 'no thank you'. SO you tell me, how do I explain to her that it is the heart that counts, it is the love you have in your friends in family, it is in the places you visit, the love you gice and one day she will find a man she maybe won't be attraced to physically but at least they'll have friendship and respect. How do I tell her she most likely won't be able to have love on her terms, the perfect love you all (and me) hope for?
And these are just two of many perplexing stories. I think that due to the media, due to women being much more liberated then before, men have changed (as I said women have changed too). It seems like we are back to those raw basics because in all honesty do you truly think genetically and biologically men were made so that they feel complete in one relationship? It is in their genetic code to produce as much offspring as possible, to look at the younger, prettier girls as these girls could bear them genetically strong, healthy,beautiful children. Women on the other hand have always been the ones that look for a protector as they have an intricate need to form and maintain a family. The interests of the two are mismatched. 0.74% per capita of the entire population in US gets divorced every year (2004). 43% ended before year 15 was up. Of course it is good to hope you won't be one of them but I don't speak about hope here, I speak about reality.

As far as your next point goes, of course love is about giving. However, is it about taking too. It should always be a balance and just as you should give your all for the relationship so should the other person. I am not going to give and give and give without getting anything in return. It is emotionally draining, unfair, mazohistic and just plain stupid.

Lust, in my opinion, should be a part of every relationship. At least at first. I understand the same excitement can not last a lifetime but once you are starting out it is very sad if there is no chemistry. And yes, I equate lust with chemistry. It truly depends on what your expectations are in a relationship. If you are satisfied with friendship and understanding I truly believe that there is a high percentage of people that can give you that. In all honesty, there is a lot of good people outhere. However, my unfortune is that I want it all. I want respect, I want friendship but I also want chemistry, lust, butterflies..all of which I won't get with a person that is good, nice, decent, earns a living etc etc but I have no chemistry with. If I don't tilt when he enters the room then there will never be any great emotions involved and what kind of a great love is that if the earth doesn't shutter when he/she is around. I would rather have nothing then be satisfied with anything less

Thank you for the book suggestions..I read Ruiz, Dyer and Chopra. I will try the rest..