I think I have a lot to say. I have a lot of pent up energy that's looming around the topics of women and relationships (being both friendships and actual relationship-relationships).
I used to be a hopeless romantic. Experience and a lot of thinking, however, has brought me to a point of wisdom where being a hopeless romantic is no longer possible. Now, this doesn't make me less of a romantic--just a different kind. I like to consider myself a hopeful romantic, but really only because it seems to convey a loss of naivete and a slight addition of a degree of praticality in its place. I still fall in love very easily, but it's a different kind of love... no less powerful as a positive, passionate force, but without the nothing-else-matters, I'll-die-if-something-happens feelings that are so often associated with the hopeless romantic affliction. Either that, or I just understand it now, and that knowledge reduces the urgency. Let me try to explain. I don't necessarily fall in love with the person so easily. I fall in love with the idea of experiencing a person--from the physical aspects (not just sexual, even brief brushes) to sharing a portion of my mental and emotional lives with them. I may grow to love the person in time, sure, but the passion comes from the desire to experience every moment as it comes, not from planning the rest of my life around my love of this one person. One of the other realizations that came was the key word "portion," both in the sense that I will always have parts of my life that are solely my own, and in that I hold no illusions that I can, at any point in my life, know exactly how I will feel after x amount of time has gone by.
I guess the moral of the story is that I'm looking for someone I respect who I can be passionate with, in all aspects of the relationship, for the time that we are both prepared to do so, with no guarantees as to the exact length of that time, not out of any plan to break up, but simply out of the acknowledgment that we cannot know what the future holds, and thus intend to spend each moment enjoying it as much as possible.
Yes, I am well aware that I'm probably going to die single and lonely because of this opinion, but it's a damn shame that so many people delude themselves into thinking that they want something to last forever, and so don't want to have anything to do with someone with no long-term expectations.
I used to be a hopeless romantic. Experience and a lot of thinking, however, has brought me to a point of wisdom where being a hopeless romantic is no longer possible. Now, this doesn't make me less of a romantic--just a different kind. I like to consider myself a hopeful romantic, but really only because it seems to convey a loss of naivete and a slight addition of a degree of praticality in its place. I still fall in love very easily, but it's a different kind of love... no less powerful as a positive, passionate force, but without the nothing-else-matters, I'll-die-if-something-happens feelings that are so often associated with the hopeless romantic affliction. Either that, or I just understand it now, and that knowledge reduces the urgency. Let me try to explain. I don't necessarily fall in love with the person so easily. I fall in love with the idea of experiencing a person--from the physical aspects (not just sexual, even brief brushes) to sharing a portion of my mental and emotional lives with them. I may grow to love the person in time, sure, but the passion comes from the desire to experience every moment as it comes, not from planning the rest of my life around my love of this one person. One of the other realizations that came was the key word "portion," both in the sense that I will always have parts of my life that are solely my own, and in that I hold no illusions that I can, at any point in my life, know exactly how I will feel after x amount of time has gone by.
I guess the moral of the story is that I'm looking for someone I respect who I can be passionate with, in all aspects of the relationship, for the time that we are both prepared to do so, with no guarantees as to the exact length of that time, not out of any plan to break up, but simply out of the acknowledgment that we cannot know what the future holds, and thus intend to spend each moment enjoying it as much as possible.
Yes, I am well aware that I'm probably going to die single and lonely because of this opinion, but it's a damn shame that so many people delude themselves into thinking that they want something to last forever, and so don't want to have anything to do with someone with no long-term expectations.