Can you fall in love with someone you have never met?
In a certain way, it seems you have to fall in love with someone you've never met. When you get to know someone, how can you know you're in love unless you've already come to lovecertain characteristics that you find irresistibly attractive?
You have to know what it is or who you would fall in love with before you meet. If you don't know that, you won't have whatever it is that will trigger the falling in love.
Romantic love is romantic because it's based on an idea. The idea of the ideal person - someone who completes you, someone who you feel naturally matches your heartbeat and your very breath. Someone who is very different from you but complements you perfectly. Someone who makes you feel entirely like a woman - if you're a woman, and someone who makes you feel like you're a true man if you're a man.
You want your completor, the rest of your identity, that person who feels like your own heart and soul to you. But you cannot know these things unless you have formed that ideal in your mind and have pursued it. Then s/he walks in the room - you just know, you just know because you can't go wrong.
Meeting Someone Special
But the other side of the story might burst your bubble. There is no "someone" unless there IS. In other words, there has to be a real person, one you actuallycan or have met, one who is actually in your life to be the person you love.
What I mean is that it is easy to feel like you've fallen in love with the star of a movie you have never met, but that might not only be hopeless (since you may never meet), but also an enormous let down if you did. All you really do when you "fall in love" with an actor or person you haven't met is to shape the ideal of what it is to be in love.
It can be amazing how love works some times. There are people who've met, known each other for years, and only truly fallen in love after they never thought that would be possible.
How does that happen? Well, in part, it's because falling in love is about your life. Truly - it shouldn't be about what you hope your life should be but never becomes, it should be about what really is.
Falling in love doesn't have to be an experiment that if it doesn't work, you try an alternative - falling in love can be a wonderful process of finding, getting to know and bonding with the right person.
But that bond doesn't have to be some romantic lottery game, with sparks and endless thoughts of what might be - you can and probably should be good friends with someone for a long time, maybe even before you realize the sexual attraction is what it really is.
Of course, you want to have a tremendous sexual attraction - after all, it's hard to think of being in love without it. But you can definitely have the sexual attraction on a physical level, without having it on a much deeper level.
Online Dating
I tried online dating for awhile and found it was not for me. It seems to work out for some people, but unlike other relationships I've had, I was very disappointed in what the prospects were, after I tried dating through a few different online sites.
There always seemed to be plenty of girls to meet, but once we met, the story was very different. I usually felt like I had been getting to know a different person. Once I got away from online dating and just met people in ordinary ways, I felt a lot more like I was getting to know real people, with real lives of their own - not a romance story or a fantasy idea of the perfect mate.
The Perfect Match
I have to admit there was a time when I became enamored of someone I met online - and we never met. She was overseas. I longed to read her messages as often as I could. I wanted to hear her voice and I wanted to know everything I could about her.
I dreamed about her - and the dreams were very vivid and seemed real. Sometimes I would wake up and go through much of the day thinking about my dream as if she had been with me the day before and left, and felt like I was missing her.
I often thought I was communicating with my lifemate. Then when I moved from Georgia to Michigan, I took a month or two, as I told her I would, and got settled, before I started thinking about how we could finally actually meet each other and be together.
I finally got back to writing her, but she wasn't there. Her emails bounced back. To this day, I'm not sure what happened. Did she meet someone else? Maybe. Did things change in her life in that time otherwise - I doubt if I'll ever know.
But the even more curious question is what if I had met? Then what? My later experiences taught me to think it might not have been everything I thought it would when we were just writing and talking. No, I can't be sure. But, you know, another thing is that all the things I thought I loved about her - I'm not sure I would be in love with that now - or that I ever really was.
There was something about the unattainability of our relationship that made it so intriguing. If I had met her at a fun event and got to know her, would she have seemed so special? Maybe, but not necessarily someone I would have fallen in love with. In fact, I think now the odds are pretty slim I would have ever fallen in love with her.
Already Met, But Far Away
Funny thing, though - to a guy, one of the most attractive things - at least when it comes to "falling in love", is a bit of unavailability.
I don't mean that in the sense of playing games. I also don't mean it in the sense ofunattainability. But if someone is in another place, is making their own, independent life important - and is still charming, approachable and, at the right time, can be touched as well - that seems like the ideal circumstance for falling in love. But it's something quite different than the online type of relationship.
Can You Fall in Love with Someone You've Never Met?
Maybe it depends on what you mean by falling in love. For me, I'll take sight, touch, movement, etc. that comes with actually meeting someone, finding the real attraction, and letting the mystique of "getting to know" each other work its magic.
But I won't sell short the romantic idea of thinking about the ideal of that interesting stranger you've never actually met either. Surely off in the distance somewhere, at some time...don't you think?
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