As a heteromantic asexual, this troper desperately wish not everyone believes in this trope. The only thing I want in a relationship is romance, nothing physical. It's rather disheartening when you realize not only do most people want the physical aspect of a relationship, sometimes that's the ONLY thing they want in a relationship.

It is for kids. When you become a teen you lose interest in the platonic aspect and gain interest in the physical part. Thank the force that created the Universe for sexual hormones.

YMMV, I'm 17 and still interested in that kind of relationship, if I could find one. Granted, I would like it a ''lot'' better with someone physically attractive; but they wouldn't have to be perfect. Also, for all I know, this is because I've never been in a relationship with anyone; but I've had more crushes than I could count on my hands, some of them having humiliated me when they found out.

Played somewhat straight with This Troper. The indirect cause isn't meeting the WrongGuyFirst, but BEING the WrongGuyFirst. I couldn't take hurting another person like that again. Also, seeing my friends break up and get hurt is pretty solid proof that it's not only limited to me. Yes, I'm sure romance feels kinda neat when you do it, but it ends in tears and is not worth it. It is, after all, merely a superficial emotion evoked in order to reproduce our species. And the planet is already overpopulated.

You're right, the planet is already overpopulated. Unsurprisingly, that doesn't stop me from 'reproducing' *shrughs* impulses are impulses.

I just want to tell you that love isn't sadness, or hurt, or pain. Love is the exact opposite of that. It's happiness and joy and peace. Love is the only thing in the world that can really fix these sad feeling inside you. I just really hope that you were having a bad day when you wrote this, because it's really not true.

And love doesn't have to be paired with lust. I love my brother, I love my parents, and I love my best friend. What makes it hurt when you lose it is, in this troper's opinion, basically AwesomenessWithdrawal.

Well, the trope is about romance.

This Troper has an extended theory about love; namely, that it comes in three different types. These types are familial, platonic, and romantic love. The types can be combined (although all 3 is kind of odd).

The ancient Greeks would have done you one better! They believed in at least four different kinds of love and had a name for each of them. ''Philia'' is friendship love, ''storge'' is familial love, ''eros'' is sexual love, and ''agape'' is deep everlasting love. Ideally, you would feel all for your life partner.

This troper is divorced. The ex-wife called it off. Full stop.

This describes me in no uncertain terms. Love... is a joke, and a bad one at that. Never once have I seen it lead to anything positive, except family. And even that's a crapshoot. Every relationship in my own life and those around me has fallen apart spectacularly, and I just don't see how the temporary happiness and joy is worth the inevitable pain. What's sad is... even despite this, I still have some notion that people deserve every chance, and I will do my part to help them with that. But I'm pretty darn certain it's too late for me.

This Troper was with the Wrong Girl First... Three times in three years with three different girls. Everytime, the girls played him like a violin (and he realised it only MUCH later). And every other girl for whom he had feelings? One of his best friends got it first and is still with her (and are, in one case, engaged). The icing on the cake? Some of them thinks he is either homosexual, jealous or a sociopath due to his JadeColoredGlasses.

This troper plays this trope straight. I believe love is only a feeling generated by the human body to tell us to keep putting out our species, along with the good feeling sex gives. ''They are only things that tell us to keep breeding our race.'' No, this isn't WrongGuyFirst, it's AllLoveIsUnrequited coupled with JadeColouredGlasses from a few experiences with people who would do most good for the human race by dying ''slowly'' in a hole. See you later.

This very scientific minded troper once would have agreed with you, but now finds proof for the existence of love in homosexual couples who love one another deeply, yet obviously cannot be motivated by a desire to breed.

My mother is this to a T. She has good reason though, considering her ex-husband is practically a CompleteMonster. Except she still likes watching chick flicks...Yeah.

A bit of a subversion (or a reconstruction? Something along those lines) with this troper. I agree with the cynics that love is silly, childish, and unrealistic, that it's all chemicals in our brains and was produced by evolution just to make us want to fuck and then stick together afterwards; it's just that I don't care. It's a pleasant fiction, and that's good enough for me. Life is far too short not to indulge- irrationally, drunkenly, stupidly- in such a wonderfully complex and beautiful feeling.

Whether it's all just chemicals or not (couldn't "all just chemicals" explain pretty much all our feelings?), it is a feeling we get, and as it is such since we perceive it as real, it ''is'' real on our mental planes.

This troper wishes she wouldn't get crushes, because they're always a bad case of IncompatibleOrientation. Every. Single. Time. Screw this! Subverted, though, in that I think other people could be perfectly happy in relationships.

I think of myself as a subversion. Since a lot of people and couples I've met over the years were only together for superficial reasons - for example, one has a lot of money, one thinking the other is "hot" and so on, without taking account of emotions and genuine feelings - it has made me lose a lot of faith in true love happening to me. The fact I have really mild AspergerSyndrome (yes, it happens) probably makes people think of me as a loner freak who is probably hopeless since I'm not "normal". I do believe, however, that somebody can see past that and love me for, well, me. But that will be a long, ''long'' time from now.

This Troper plays it straight, despite being only fifteen. Love exists as a form of biological programming, alerting people that the children they could have with a certain person would be optimal. (Being an IceQueen doesn't help her at all.) But she doesn't feel like she's missing out on anything, so she's fine with it. This trope may or may not contribute to her {{Asexuality}} and aromanticism.

This trope fits me like a god damned glove. Pretty much from the very start things looked bad. My parents had a bad marriage and argued at the top of their lungs all of the time. My wee childhood friend always insisted that she and my brother were going to get married, right in front of Chopped Liver here. I was also raised with a very strong understanding of the difference of fiction and reality, and the former was the only place I ever saw proper love. When I grew older and took an interest in the fairer sex, I was constantly shot down. Regardless, I continued to revise my strategy for romance with the alchemist like belief that it would work if I only got it right. One time I got rejected by a girl who I was infatuated with before I even made a move, ignoring me straight to my face even though before I had any romantic interest in her, she and I got along rather well. In an English class, I wrote a morose, self-depreciating essay about how love was probably beyond my grasp. He chastised me for being a cynic. He has a loving wife and no real negative romantic influences. Sure, perhaps I haven't just found the right way yet, but as a whole, love isn't making much of a case for itself.

Love is a joke. Enough said

I see dramatic bullcrap and stupid, vague, passive-aggressive statuses on {{Facebook}} all the time, so I'm definitely thinking that ''teen'' love is for kids. ''Stupid'' kids that watch the Disney Channel. Also, almost every married couple I've ever heard of got divorced (when my parents were together, all my old friends had divorced parents, and my current friends have HappilyMarried parents while mine are divorced. So I have kind of settled on the belief that monogamous relationships are against human nature; just a thing that we've invented because it gives us hope (which is how I feel about the whole concept of "faith"). I have one person who I sometimes feel like I'm in love with, but this is unfortunately a case of both WrongGuyFirst ''AND'' IncompatibleOrientation. And everyone else I'm interested in and feel I have a chance with has some trait that JustBugsMe.

So every married couple you've ever heard of has gotten divorced even though you have a number of friends whose parents are in happy relationships?

The Subject of "Love" is the only topic that turns this otherwise happy and optimistic troper into an unhappy pessimist. It is the one sore spot I have that turns me very bitter in a hurry. The more I see romance and love idealized in virtually every work of fiction and every avenue of human expression, the more I see how absolutely overrated love is. I am so disgusted by the idea that I have a very low tolerance for it. I do not think I will ever be able to truly understand how people are able to trust and devote themselves to that one person in their lives they had somehow considered to be "more than just a friend". How did we get there? Was it those gestures of "affection" (hand-holding, kissing, whispering, physical closeness)? Was it infatuation that just "happens", no doubt due to a factitious desire for a significant other? Or is it (My personal favorite!) all Love at first sight?? Oh... how I loathe romance, especially when it is idealized as this flawless compelling force that brings any and all people together. There are those that may actually find it, and in that case, I say, good for you, now go take your displays of affection elsewhere! But the reality is: relationships fail, people can AND are hurt by failed relationships, feelings may never be reciprocated, and infatuations tend to have a nasty habit of clouding one's ability to make decisive judgment and rationale. Logic and reasoning should NEVER be substituted for these fleeting feelings of "affection" because how do you know he/she is worth giving your "love"? Are they worth dying for?! That is of course, assuming you were even able to obtain their attention and "affections" in the first place! This thing we call "love"? Beyond being the driving force for reproduction of our species, I see little else than fantasies that we can do without. In fact, one can easily function through life without sex or a significant other of their own. Good riddance to that burden. As harsh as the reality had struck me, at that it is a fantasy buried under false hope and impossible dreams and that there are those who will note find it, I now believe that that is how it is. I no longer even know what is the reason why I had bothered letting myself become infatuated and aroused in the first place! Just why DID I bother?! The sooner I concern myself less and less with the silly ideal of finding "her" and abandoning it all together, the better.

Seconded by This Troper in turn, who was turned by the so-called ThePowerOfLove from an adherent of enlightened reason to a depressed Romantic NietzscheWannabe.

This troper keeps trying to remind himself that this can apply sometimes. He always gets jealous when he sees other people all over each other, giving each other attention, and pretty much everything that almost keeps from crossing into SickeninglySweethearts territory. Over time, he's begun to realize it's not really ''love'' he's looking for, just a very strong bond of friendship with someone. Helped along by the fact that he thinks if he ever does fall in love, it would probably be just like a normal friendship (regarding how we act with each other), just with us knowing there's something deeper there.

Deconstructed and subverted with this troper. I was this during my teen years. It didn't work out too well ... let's just say that when this gets cranked up to eleven and set on a collision course with {{Yandere}}, the outcome isn't pretty. Ironically, I was introduced to my now wife of twelve years while relating the tale to mutual aquaintances.

This Troper fully believes in this. Every relationship he's had has ended badly. When he attempts romance (most often due to the failures of the past fading from recent memory), it inevitably blows up in his face. The most common excuse he's given is that she 'doesn't feel like dating right now,' even after several dates. This has happened to him every single time with every single girl in the past six years (five times, in case you were wondering). He tries to take solace in that love (like any emotion) is simply a result of chemicals in the brain, and that love is merely a facade we use so we can feel better about propagating our species.

I adamantly believe that '''''LoveHURTS''''' . Well, I hold beliefs that would be instantly labelled as for {{Nietzsche Wannabe}}s. Nevertheless, it does not keep me from listening to Romantic music (the Classical Music kind, not that pop music bullshit) and suffering cases of PerverseSexualLust. (well, love does make you irrationally delusional to the point of {{breaking the fourth wall}}. Take the Christians loving God for starters. Or the kids, succumbing to this drug called ThePowerOfLove, seeing everything in a "Princess or dragon" dichotomy. Or more scientifically, Romantic love is in fact linked to high levels of dopamine. Dopamine is linked to schizophrenia. Love does make you crazy. In other words, Love is a fairytale. Literally. Not only that, love to fiction is easier because if you love a real life person, that's when LoveHurts to the point that it reaches {{despair event horizon}}.)

A lot of people this troper knows believe this-- even though all the adults we know are happily married! The cool guy everyone idolizes has been married for almost 50 years... There's a difference between "I am heartbroken" and "love is for morons and toddlers". Worse are the people who believe that, when you hit your teens, relationships are only physical. *facepalm* It's not even possible to have a romantic relationship before your teens! (Or during them.) It turns out the guy I kinda-sorta liked only finds me "sexy." I swear, I ''will'' find a man who believes in love. And we'll rant about this together.

This troper sometimes loses faith, or comes close to it. He is willing to believe, but ranting is beyond him in this case; besides, convincing people that what they firmly believe is false isn't usually his strong suit.

I would be a case of . . . zig-zagging? Maybe? I believe that love is a great idea, except that I honestly don't understand what it is. Like, really. I get what it means to care about somebody as a friend. I get what it means to want somebody sexually. Is love just a combination of the two? That seems kind of sad, honestly. I've had so many people trying to explain it to me, but I just . . . don't . . . get it. I'm sure it works for some people, but I honestly have no idea what on Earth they're talking about.

You sound a lot like me. In any case, wouldn't you like to find out?

I'm not even sure where to begin with this. Here is what romance is. It is infatuation and sexual desire. Nothing more. It is simply a biological mechanism that increases inclination for reproduction, and for that matter, continues the legacy of the wretched human species. People who genuinely believe in the concept of "The One" are proof of just how strong this desire is, and how much it clouds your judgment. In fact, infatuation is yet another emotion that does just that, and "love" is a religion centered around this emotion (I used the term "religion" because religion is an irrational and strong set of beliefs manifested from any irrational and strong emotion, to the point where people willingly enslave themselves to them, and "love" is no different). I am ashamed to admit that I fall victim to this lust as well, as much as I keep reminding myself how useless it is, and what a fool I am for allowing this desire to affect me so much. My marks in school have suffered lately, and I did not get into any universities and will be taking another year, and I blame it partially on my lust for a certain girl two years younger than me prevailing over my better judgment (the rest on my general incompetence and the inability to get homework done). Yet I still have this lust for her, and for the idea of romance, and yet another emotional burden is the question of whether or not she feels the same about me. My struggle with these superficial thoughts rages on to this day. At the same time, the false hope it gives me (i.e. the dopemine) is one of the few things that keep me from claiming my own life. I have never attempted to actually make a move toward a girl, and some may say I should, but not only am I too awkward to, I have seen how badly the pain of rejection wounded other people, and it may actually drive me towards my end, so I do not bother. I apologize if you've read all of this garbage, but no one is forcing you to (as far as I know), so I accept no responsibility for any time wasted on this.