Do you believe in one true love or many potential true loves?

Is it possible to agree with both ideas? I like to think that there is one “perfect” match out there for everyone, but that a person can have a happy and fulfilling relationship even if they never meet that “perfect” person.

Yeah, both id say. There is one amongst the many.

When I was quite young and inexperienced, I believed in only one. As I got older and acquired more experience, I learned you can fall in love many times.

I think it depends on the decisions we make in life, who we meet, and who we’re attracted to. So I would say I believe that there are many possible true loves, but some may be more compatible than others.

Many potential loves – true and otherwise.

I guess i am alone in my answer. i believe that a person only has one true love. sure, you can date many different people and think you are in love with them. but cupid has a funny way of making just that one person, so special. many people have married people they thought they were in love with. but, their heart tells a different story. once you have dated or married that one special person, you will be forever comparing other people and there is no comparison.

One question on Fluther many months ago, dealt with a similar question. most of the answers stated they wished they had stayed or married that one special person.

Think about this: are you now dating or married to the person that “is that special person”? some of us have married people that really did not hold the heart strings to our hearts. think about this.

I think we differed in opinion because she married her first boyfriend. I did not.

Also, my husband and I have had times in our marriage where I’m sure we both wanted to call it quits. We didn’t. We worked hard and recommitted to one another and happily, we are more in love today then we were when we got married.

If someone had asked me if I married my true love in the first 5 years of our marriage I would have said no. I would answer very differently today.

I know as humans we can fall in love with many people. There are also many different levels of love.
We have hopefully all felt love and if that relationship falls apart or if sadly one partner dies, we do have the ability to find another love.
I believe that there is a level of a “true love” A love that is giving and sharing and open. One that is mutual between the two. This kind of true love can certainly sustain us and can make us happy in our life in what we do and share.
I also am of the firm believe that there is a more powerful “perfect love” out there. One person that is our mirror. One person that you seemingly don’t even need words. One person that you can bare you soul to. One that in a way, shares your soul. A person that you seemingly know all about them before ever meeting them. A person that you envisioned and envisioned you. That being found makes for an “ultimate love”.

It’s all random, and there’s no such thing. If you didn’t meet your current mate by whatever chance you had to meet him/her, you would have met someone else.

Only one. I can lust a lot of people, but only love one.

But being the brokenhearted sour on love person that I am, my truthful answer would be that it isn’t real.

Tim Minchin explains it beautifully here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gaid72fqzNE&NR=1

Better version.

Yes, I am married to her! The honeymoon is far from over, I would have thought it would have been, since, after all we just celebrated our twelth wedding aniversary.

I have loved and been loved many times. Falling in love is easy for me, especially when it was the one thing that could make me feel good.

It’s a bit freaky, because I’d like to think that I’m a person making choices, instead of a machine whose choices are programmed by hormones and neurotransmitters. But romance is both me making my actions mean something and the chemicals pushing me to do things.

A perfect match? I don’t think so. I think there are many good matches and bad matches and, well, come to think of it, perfect matches. That’s because judgments are human things. The world doesn’t care who pairs up with whom. It is only we who decide if our love is perfect or not. Perfect is a matter of taste and of choice.

I don’t believe in perfection, so I don’t find it. Other people do believe in it, and so they do find it. But I could call my marriage perfect if I wanted to, and who is anyone else to say otherwise? My wife loves me more that I ever thought I deserved. She has stood with me through some pretty serious trials, and I would stick with her, and have stuck with her, through her own trials.

On first blush, I wouldn’t call it perfect. But now I realize I can call it perfect if I want. It may have it’s problems, but it is a relationship like no other, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of it. It’s what we think of it. I might not have done this even a few days ago, but I think I do have a perfect marriage. And if not perfect, amazing. But it is perfect and that does not mean I couldn’t have had a different perfect marriage with someone else.

Human perfection, I think, is not necessarily a pretty thing. It may not look perfect. It may not fit some ideal form. But for all that, inside the soul of the thing, humans are as perfect as they consider themselves to be. Why not decide to be perfect? Why not?

I think there are many true loves, but the process of finding that person is so caught up in chance and timing that we don’t have the time to invest in finding them all.

Relationships are made, not found. Even my “perfect match” and I would need to learn how to have a relationship with one another. The myth that everything will work out once we find “the one” is probably behind many, many broken hearts.

What, anyway, is the practical benefit of believing in a single true love? If there is one, and only one, person who matches me perfectly, am I supposed to scour the world to find her? She could be anywhere and speak any language. Unless, of course, we believe that things have been conveniently designed such that we must run across one another. But how is that distinguishable from me meeting someone I like and learning how to make it work?

@BarnacleBill you are right and I think thats the hard part. You cant look for it.

I guess it depends what you mean by true love. I think I’m romantically and sexually compatible with a great number of people, so if thats all it takes, then there are a lot! I don’t think I like anyone enough to promise to spend the rest of my life living with them, so if that’s what true love means, then I don’t think I’ve got any. Probably your definition falls somewhere between those and the number of people who qualify necessarily falls somewhere along that line.

But I agree with @SavoirFaire that relationships are made, not found. As the great Tom Robbins wrote:

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”

I believe most of us need to experience love more than once in order to finally find one mature and lasting love.

Potential true love

I don’t believe there is just one. And it means you have to be the just one for the other. The thought of being SOL if I missed her or blew my chances years ago is pretty damn depressing.

My ex had a friend who swore her husband was her soul mate, that they had been fated to marry. She claimed that years after the marriage ended; he was her soul mate but she couldn’t stand being married to him.

I also believe many potentials. What is ‘true’ love anyway? -the opposite of lying love, or false love? There are different loves. I know what you are saying @john65pennington but you are not being tested, challenged. If your wife had died 20 years ago you may have found another love.

I have been many different people in my lifetime. I married young and we were together 16 years, but we grew in different directions and decided we were no longer the “one and only” for the other. Since then I have loved different people at different times in my life because I am always growing and changing therefore what I want from a partner has changed as well. So I am one of those who believes in many “potentials.”

I don’t believe there’s just one other person that’s fated or pre-destined for you. There are over six billion people on the planet and if only one of them was your “true love” it would be a miracle of extreme proportions for you to ever meet at all.

I think there is the potential to turn many relationships into a “true love” relationship. Perhaps not quite any one, but certaily more than one. It always takes work from both parties.

I think Tim Minchin expresses this best

I think there is a huge difference between being in love with one person for the rest of your life and finding your “one true love.” Quite frankly, I don’t think there is such a thing as one, perfect love. If you are happy now, and you are still happy a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, when you die, why does it matter if you have found your “perfect” love? You are happy and that’s really all that matters.

On a related note, I knew a kid in high school who believed that you could only really love on person. When he and his then-girlfriend broke up, he thought he would never be in love again because he had his one love and she left him.

@KatawaGrey Exactly! I had that experience twice in high school before realizing it would have been impossible to have it twice if there was really only one true love for me. That definitely helped me to grow up and wise up.

The one thing I could never figure out with the one true love concept was:How do I find one person when there are so many people out there in the world? Never could figure that out. I vote for love the one you’re with, if they deserve it. And don’t stick with someone that treasts you like crap.

There can be many true loves in your life. What about those that marry them and then death takes him/her? Many of these people find a love just as rewarding as the first.

Many true loves. But the one I’m with has been my greatest love of all.