True love — real love — never stops. Relationships can end, but your love for a person does not. By definition, if it’s love, it’s forever.
Love in the present — right now — like everything you do has evolutionary influence and benefit. When you love someone, or something, your brain releases hormones (oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline, testosterone, estrogen, and vasopressin) that create mixed feelings: euphoria, joy, or bonding. Oxytocin is the most powerful — think about the first time you felt in love. Everything seemed sharper. That person is a part of you.
The world is sticky and permanent. It is love and a return to evolutionary benefit, allowing you to care for others. Concern for others accomplishes 2 things evolutionarily. It keeps them living, which helps you pass on your genes. Caring for other people is the beginning of civilization. And it also keeps you alive. People care for you. So, you also pass on your genes. Just as your ancestors who first found a patch of fresh fruit released dopamine in their brains so they were motivated to return to that place the next day, to eat and survive, love releases chemicals that keep you alive. We benefit from falling in love.
However, what about the ways in which the relationship ends? Maybe this is a particular thing for individuals (and maybe there are some people who are incapable of feeling love due to genetic differences), but at least I can speak from personal experience, I am incapable of not loving once I have loved. I know this more than I believed. His love changed, of course I didn’t love the person I first loved romantically.
I’m actually very happy because he fell in love with someone else. Because that makes him happy. That makes me happy. But I know that 10 years later I’d still do anything for him. And we probably met 2 times at most in the last 10 years. But I’m not skimping on a single aspect; that if he asks me to be there for him and his family, I will. Without a doubt I would stop what I was doing and help. There are still attachments that make me want to provide support. Care. It’s up to you what you want to call it. And not just that one person, because I have been blessed to truly fall in love more than once.
Loving someone or something that can’t give you anything biologically might be considered a loss. But, love them as much as we do. I’ve shed tears for my dead dog, and walked in the middle of a pitch-white blizzard all over the mountain just to lay my hand on the rock where it was buried. There’s no survival mechanism that requires me to do that. Only eternal love.
I have shed tears for my late mother since she passed away. I have seen elderly people crying over their children who died 20 years before.
So, back to the original premise. Is true love exist? “Love is the only thing that transcends time and space,” said Anne Hathaway in a scene from the movie Interstellar. This was the only thing that could be done. Love is the only real, permanent thing. It knows no limitations of physics, biology, or evolution. So please know that true love exists. In fact, it’s all I know that exists forever.
