How Often do People Find True Love?

Face it; most of us have an old flame in our past. Many women and men wonder if they are settling with their current partner, while rehashing memories of a previous love. Many of us don rose-colored glasses when recalling a previous romantic partner. Ironically, women are guiltier of this than men.

Facebook survives on forty-ish women trying to find old high school boyfriends. About a half of social media users stalk exes online. One ambitious writer put out the call for women to send her stories of high school or college sweethearts who tried to reconnect. Surprisingly, the tales were rather sad.

It wasn’t because the men didn’t want to associate with their former girlfriends. In their early years, the women thought their honeys had so much potential. A reunion twenty or thirty years later demonstrated the former Romeos never realized their potential or never had it.  The old flames disappointed eight out of ten women immediately. Two managed to rekindle an affair, but one of them sputtered out. What gives?

Most people might imply the people were never in love, which could be true. We don’t want to think we were in love and it didn’t work out. Often we’ll say we were attracted, had a crush, and were in lust, anything but love. There is a theory that you can only be in love once in your life. This is why unattached women keep mining their romantic history, trying to find lost love.

This dominant theory has led to a great deal of unhappiness. People who lose a beloved romantic partner believe they can never love again.  One dating ‘expert’ declared people in their forties could not expect to find love again because they’d already loved. The best they could hope for was to find someone they could tolerate.

There is hope for all of you who have loved and lost. You can love again and the Siemens Festival Nights survey backs it up. We already know from the Wired magazine article that people are living longer and dating more with the end result being it takes an average of thirteen relationships to find that special someone.

Most people fall deeply in love twice.  Women tend to fall in love more than men. It usually takes a person about ten weeks to decide if he or she is in love, according to eHarmony. Average people are still very cautious around one another, even after they feel pangs of love. It takes most couples about 2.8 years to marry after realizing they are in love.

People are always looking for true love.  As many as 46% stated in the survey they’d leave their current partner if they fell in love with someone else. Men are more loyal to their current partner than women are, via survey results. Unfortunately, what we call love is often a chemical response of pheromones. Many a man and woman, who darted after a hard body, left behind a loving partner thinking they found “the one.” The loving partner wasn’t up for taking their former partner back either.

Most people believe they’ve been in love at least twice. They also see in retrospect that many relationships they thought were love, weren’t. One in seven people currently believe they are not in love with their current partner. Out of that unhappy population, 73% now realize they allowed real love to slip through their fingers. The big question is, how did that happen?

We all know things don’t always go well every day. In fact, many have bailed out of a love relationship at the smallest crack. Maybe a job forces one partner to move and the other doesn’t want to go. The woman might own a cat and the man is allergic. Even though most of us still hold to the theory that we might only love once, we still give up on love fast, to become one of those tragic movie characters who lets love slip through his or her fingers.

Are you in this situation right now? The good news is the 2012 survey suggested we fall in love four times in our lives. Those are better odds.