CMV: I believe "Love" (big L) is a fantasy people tell themselves to pretend they're a better person than they really are

Not to be dismissive, but I would say that the love a person has for a screaming shitting child can be explained as a hormonal effect. That doesn't make it any less "real" than any other emotions, but nature has conditioned you to believe your child is the best thing ever because its evolutionarily useful. I would personally categorize that sort of "love" as something totally different as it's the direct result of a biological drive to produce offspring.

As far as romantic love and "True Love" go, its easy to write off one person's failed love as "true" and another's as false after the fact, but can you tell the difference BEFORE the relationship ends? If you ask me, they don't start out any different, and they're ultimately the same feeling. The real difference is, as I stated before, the particular circumstances.

You find a pretty boy/girl you have a lot in common with, you "fall in love". If nothing ever comes between you then people call it true love. If however one of you really wants to live in Canada and the other really wants to live in Ireland and neither of you will budge then it doesn't matter if the two of you were compatible in literally every other aspect imaginable, you could still break up. And once you do people will say that it wasn't real or else they would have made it work. But what if the "true" love couple would have had the same argument if only they'd had the money to move? What if it just never came up? Dismissing emotions on the basis of circumstance doesn't really do anything to prove that love is real.

Example: My ex and I still get along really well. In a lot of ways I'm more similar in personality to her than her boyfriend is. The only reason we grew bored of each other was because we were at separate colleges and only saw each other every few weekends. That made it hard to have new experiences together, so our conversations grew stale. Does the fact that we were at different schools mean our love was somehow less real than with her current boyfriend who just so happens to be able to provide her with a farm, and a boat, and a beach condo to do fun things at? Those fun things make it a lot easier for the relationship to remain interesting. But if they're together forever and never argue, that doesn't invalidate the relationship we had, nor does it prove theirs is better. Only that the circumstances of their relationship is more conducive to longetivity.

/r/changemyview Thread Parent