Well, thanks for ruining my day :(
Why?
I've been with my wife, including dating, for 27 years. Before her was... a mistake. The one before her, I wanted to live with for the rest of my life, but she didn't feel the same way. She married someone else while I was at college and I didn't find out until I got home. I wouldn't change a single line. Not one note. The pain and the joy are both sides of the same coin.
Or are you referring to yourself?
Am I honestly supposed to believe you have never been in love? You've been in love, just not the way I have been.
You may have made a friend that you thought would last forever.
You may have had a pet that sat on your head at night and sneezed snot on you while you slept.
You may have known the love of your parents, or sister, or brother, or uncle.
You might have met someone on line who just "got" you. You have never seen them face to face, but you know this person is worthy of the emotion of love.
You're human. You can 'bond' with anything. You can come to feel love for a moth, or a coat, or a person.
We just happen to be discussing love between a man and a woman.
Look, I'm sorry, but this is WRITING. This isn't safe. This isn't 'fun'. You are taking words and putting them to paper with the intent of conveying an EMOTION to someone. That's not safe. This isn't easy. I don't care what emotion your goal is, it's dangerous. If you want to get good at this, you're going to be taking risks.
You are going to get hurt.
Guess what?
That's what love is all about.
It's about caring about something enough to risk getting hurt for that thing. You can love someone, or love something, or love a concept, or love what you do, or love your job, or love... just about anything.
Love is caring in a positive way.
One cannot love if one does not care. This is often why we have that Trope of "They Hate Each Other So Much They Wind Up Fucking"
I cannot HATE you if I don't care about you. I just care about you in a negative fashion. The more you care, the more intense the emotion, the more you come to understand the target of your "caring" The more you hate something, the more you understand it, and the easier it is to flip that feeling to love, because it would be such a RELIEF to finally purge yourself of all that negativity.
And if you deeply, TRULY love someone... Trust me...
Nobody can hurt you deeper than that person.
Michael tore my heart out and ripped it to pieces in front of me. I went from 'Love deeper than the sea" to "I will never forgive you as long as I live" in a single word uttered from her lips.
This is why it is tied to sex. Because sex is special. It is a deep part of ourselves and to trivialize it is to trivialize our own worth.
The average woman finds only 20% of men above average in appearance, and the average man sees 50% of women above average. By definition, the average woman should see 50% of men as above average. They don't. Why? Men chase women. Women don't have to put forth effort to attract man, so they can afford to be picky. If you include other factors, this means about 50% of the women out there would have to put forth little to no effort to get laid, where as, because of other factors, only about 10% of men find it easy to get laid. (It's complicated. Trust the science)
When you sleep around, it only takes 3 partners in a row to establish a pattern. If you treat three partners the same way, your brain develops expectations and chemically speaking, it gets harder to 'fall in love'. This is where you get your peter pan syndrome. The man-child who never grows up, but that's only 10% of the male population at risk.
50% of the female population is at risk.
A woman has sex with say 10 guys and then asks, "Why do my relationships never work out?" It's because you TRAINED your BRAIN to not fall in love. It happens to men, but we just don't have the same opportunities as women.
Conversely, when you have a male with a stabile relationship, about age 30+, they start being more appealing to women. Women at that age get more desperate, so they become the aggressive ones. Men, who have NEVER really been chased by women, suddenly start getting hit on.
And we have NO CLUE how to handle it.
Woman have lots of experience with being chased. It's no big deal. Assuming the woman in question hasn't sabotaged her dopamine receptors, if she's in a long term relationship, she finds it easy to shrug off being hit on. The man, on the other hand, has no clue what to do. It's a completely alien concept.
And so we have the mid-life crisis that results in males in perfectly good relationships cheating on their partners.
Why? Because we aren't HONEST with people. We don't teach kids how the brain works and how it influences how we develop and how we form relationships. We lie to our kids and say, "You can be anything when you grow up!" and "Follow your dreams!" and "You choose what you are!"
No.
You have limits. You have strengths and weaknesses. You can be 'anything' when you grow up, but you will SUCK at being most of those things. Following your dreams is fine, AFTER you have secured yourself and provided for a healthy mind, body, and a job to provide for yourself and/or others.
You can choose what you are, within limited parameters. You can only be as nice as the world allows you to be. I don't think anyone in Ukraine right now as the option to be an astronaut.
It's also the same thing with love.
My advice? Don't go it alone. You have parents, talk to them. You have friends, get their opinions. Sex is special. Don't treat it like a commodity. Don't sell yourself on OnlyFans as you worth far more than they'd pay. Trust me, they make a profit SOMEHOW. Don't sleep around just because you can, because, honestly, if I could go back in time, I'd skip over both of the first two women I was with. I'm worse for having spent my time with them.
And that's not to say if you have a body count in the 200's, you are worthless. You aren't, you just haven't done yourself any favors. It takes a lot of work to fix someone like that so they can learn how to be happy and love someone else. My wife didn't love herself. It took a few years to wear her down, but eventually I convinced her that she was special. In retrospect, I suppose I should have found someone "better", but the truth is, I was an idealistic fool and I was going to "save" her. If you asked her, I think she would tell you I did.
It's been rough, but like I said, I wouldn't change a single line, not one note.
The secret is, she helped me as well. I saved her, she saved me. The problem with romance stories is that usually it's a fantasy and that sells. But we usually tell it from one point of view, and normally it is 'Man sacrifices everything for woman." When that will never work. She needs to put in work as well. Love is work. We lie to people in our romances and say, "And they live happily ever after."
No.
Reality is, "And they lived happily." Time moves on, entropy occurs, bad things happen. If they both don't work at it, it won't work. One side sacrificing all time and you are doomed to fail. Because someone has to pay the bills, someone has to get a job, someone has to raise the kids, someone has to change the diapers, someone has to get up at 3am to feed the baby, someone has to take care of a hundred annoying things.
It is easier when you share the load.
Nothing builds a bond like walking through hell with someone else.
The pain you endure today becomes the joke you share tomorrow.
Sorry I ruined your day.
I hope it improves.
All I can say is, I have yet to meet someone who was truly unworthy of love. If you wish to be loved, then may I recommend you work on your self-esteem first. I'm pushing fifty and I can say, from personal experience:
Orgasms do not lead to self-esteem.
Living a life I can be proud of leads to self-esteem.
I live a life of virtue and personal honor this is what I am proud of.
I can look in my mirror and NOT hate that man.
Pride is the single most expensive thing I own.
Sometimes I must sacrifice it for those I care about, and I do not let it go cheap.
But I will not sacrifice my pride for something as meaningless as pleasure.
Defer gratification for a better tomorrow.
These are the foundations I have built myself upon and what made it possible to enjoy the love I know.
It's work, but I don't know an easier way.
I hope that helps.
