[Excelsior]

(03-21-2015 04:18 PM)Vaun Wrote:  

As I age, the concept of "love" between a man and a women appears to be a societal construct. A forced, marketed and bullshit exercise to support economic interests; namely the women and marketers that benefit from your earning potential. And for the 1/10 marriages that is actually happy, you have to ask yourself what its all worth.

There are only a select few women in your life who will ever be capable of maintaining truly unconditional love for you as a man:

1. Your mother
2. Some of your female relatives (ex: your grandmother, your sister, maybe some of your aunts, etc)
3. Your daughters

That's it. If you seek truly unconditional love from a woman who is not in one of the above categories, you will probably be searching for a lifetime. Men are the true romantics. Women, generally speaking, can love men only conditionally. This is because the mating game (particularly from the female perspective) is inherently conditional, and that reality can't be altered no matter how aggressively marketers and assorted dreamers with little understanding of (or willingness to embrace and accept) the cold realities of human nature preach the contrary.

I suspect that, deep down, there's a part of every man that, consciously or unconsciously, recognizes this reality. I think it is a big reason why men get so funny about their daughters. For many men (ex: those who had no sisters/weren't close to them, those whose older female relatives were few in number or have all gone, etc), a daughter represents their only realistic chance at receiving truly unconditional affection and love from a female. The romantic/sexual attention they may receive from the women they date/marry is too conditional and ephemeral to truly replace this.