Source: WENN

41-year-old beauty, Jada Pinkett Smith, is known for utilizing her Facebook page to tackle some pretty interesting subjects. Her latest discussion was about relationships and the requirements necessary for true love to flourish. She initially started out by posing a question to her Facebook followers.

“Is a man’s heart in his p#*!s?

Ok…I need my Facebook family to help dissolve a debate between a few girlfriends and me in regard to this question, “Is great sex the only need, or primary need, for a man to have a good relationship with his partner?” Everyone put a YES or NO before your comment so that it’s easier to count the results. I will post the outcome tomorrow,” she posted.

The next day, she followed up by sharing her perspective on the debate, stressing that true love is a choice and something that is “created,” as opposed to romance, which is something that simply “happens.”

“I believe true love is very real. The question is, are we prepared to CREATE it? Most of us are conditioned to believe that true love HAPPENS to us…effortlessly. My experience has been that romantic love happens effortlessly. The meeting of the eyes that lights you afire inside can happen without our consent, which could be the ENTRY point to true love or to a grand love affair that prepares you for the true love waiting in the wings. Many of us have equated that intoxicating, romantic feeling to true love. But true love is not created only in the intoxicating romance.

True love is mostly created in the troubles, storms, misunderstandings, and deceptions where love is no longer romantic but excruciating. Love is created in forgiveness and in the maturity of accepting the human nature of ourselves and our partner. If you can survive these stages through your fight and growth for love…then TRUE LOVE will reveal itself because it becomes the stuff that CREATES long lasting…true love.

Remember this… When we engage in the dance of love…we are all dancing blindly. We are ALL students of love, learning ON one another. Be patient with the inevitable pains our ignorance delivers.”

Would you agree?

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It’s said that love is blinding, and that’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes true love makes us hone in on the things that matter, and somehow forget all the things that don’t. The opposite is also true: when we don’t care deeply for someone, all we see are the unimportant things. What should otherwise be cute quirks feel like unbearable flaws. Side notes become the point. And you can bet if a man can’t stop complaining about these “quirks” about you, he’s just not into you.

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You’ve probably heard of the 5 love languages. As a refresher they are: words of affirmation, quality time, gift giving, acts of service and physical touch. According to some schools of thought, these are the 5 ways a person can show love. It’s believed most people speak in three out of the five languages. But, we think this view can be a little limiting. Plus we want to give credit to the men out there who don’t necessarily speak any of these languages fluently, but show love in other very tangible ways.

At 19, my grandmother gave birth to her first child. Just before her 22nd birthday, she welcomed a second, my mom. Though both children were by the same man, my grandmother, Elizabeth, was forced into single-motherhood and found herself struggling to provide a decent life for her two kids. She suffered from a deep pain after dealing with the lies, cheating and disrespect from my grandfather, who at the time was an immature boy filled with lust and weakness for women. Not too long after she moved on from him, she found herself in an abusive relationship with a two-timing man who battled alcoholism.

Years after putting up with his abuse and experiencing several other not-so-good relationships, she finally found happiness when she married my step-grandfather Poppa Joe. My grandmother was 34-years-old. But after over 25 years of marriage, they parted ways when Poppa Joe decided that he wanted to live his life with another woman. And once again, my grandmother was left wallowing in pain. She’s had nights when she cried herself to sleep and moments when she felt ashamed. For a long, long time after her divorce, my grandmother truly suffered. I could see the disappointment and anguish whenever I looked into her eyes, and for a while, she lived with no one to call her own. That is until she met Sam.

It took 10 years, but my beautiful grandmother is finally getting the love that she deserves. She wasn’t looking for anyone, but God sent her a man who truly makes her happy. They met this past September. My grandmother was visiting her sister’s house just across the road when one of her brother-in-law’s friends stopped by accompanied by Sam, one of his good buddies. Sam was obviously attracted to my grandmother because he sparked up a flirty conversation and offered to walk her home at the end of the night.

The next day, Sam came back, looking for the pretty little lady he’d met that Sunday evening. He ended up getting her number and it’s been fireworks ever since. They just clicked. Since they’ve been dating, he comes over and she cooks for him. They spend time watching movies together, having intimate conversations, and holding one another at night. He calls her before he goes to work, on his way home from work, and random times in the day just to tell her he loves her. Sam opens doors, gives my grandmother compliments on her appearance whenever he sees her and isn’t afraid to let any and everyone know that he’s in love with his lady.

After years of not being lucky in love, and dealing with more heartache and pain than one woman should ever have to handle, my grandmother is the happiest I’ve ever seen her in my life. Every time I talk to her on the phone, the conversation always ends up on Sam, and I can feel her radiating through the receiver. Sam treats her like a queen, and for the first time in her life, she’s with a man who makes her feel like the luckiest lady on the planet. It has been a long time coming and a nice change for her after years of dealing with liars, manipulators and a wealth of disrespect. As a truly good and loving woman, I always wanted my grandmother to receive the same type of love and appreciation she gives out to others. It’s pretty amazing, but yes, my 70-year-old grandmother finally found her soul mate. She’s in love, and for everyone who knows her and the hell she’s been through in her lifetime, we all know that she deserves it. So while you might think love will never find you after a series of up and down relationships and time put into them, after watching what my grandmother has been through and the love she has found, it’s clear that only God really knows what is in store for you. It’s never too late to find the love that you deserve.

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We watch movies to see stories that we could never experience, and to witness worlds that just aren’t real. We remember this when watching horror films, slapstick comedy, and psychological thrillers. But for some reason, when it comes to romantic movies, we like to think that really could happen. And then you have a bunch of disappointed women running around. Here are dumb ideas that some of the biggest romantic movies have promoted.

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Wikipedia defines four kinds of love. Agape. Eros. Philia. Storge.  But, I’m not buying that “I love you” line. Most people wouldn’t recognize love if it walked by naked in a pair of red pumps. I’m no cynic. I believe in love, real love, but the way the word is thrown around makes me a little bit sick. And that’s why I cancelled the hotel reservation and went to that Nas concert alone. 

Kyle*  was my boyfriend, 3 boyfriends ago and we almost got married. So glad we didn’t. It’s scary now thinking about it because I would have ended up that lonely woman from Revolutionary Road waiting around for the opportunity to start living. But Kyle didn’t see it that way. Our relationship was one of convenience and when we moved in together things got a lot worse before they got better. Actually, they never got better, they just got worse and if I were to see him now, he’d say his fondest memory of me never happened.

One day, I’m not sure when, he started telling me that he loved me. He even recited those three words over and over again after we broke up to validate their truth, but I never bought it. Love doesn’t look like screaming matches at 11 o’clock at night or text messages that read “I wish I never met you.” How do you love someone, truly love them, and then one day, don’t anymore? They say agape love is an unconditional love. What does that mean anyway? It’s redundant. Isn’t all love unconditional? If the love depends on a condition, then it’s not love. It’s lust, infatuation, a lot of like or just pretending to be what someone told you love looks like.

I have a sister… I love her. Can’t fall out of love with her, could never hate her, can’t stop caring, can’t stop giving a damn. Not even if I tried. Some would call it Storge, the familial love, like a mother has for her child, but that’s nonsense. Parents love children, sisters love brothers, friends love friends, and husbands love wives, but that doesn’t mean the love, it’s definition, is any different or any stronger. Love is love, no matter the relationship of the people loving. So if I could never stop loving my mother, or my children, how then, could Kyle stop loving me? Love doesn’t go away. I believe in loving from a distance. Some people weren’t meant to be a forever integral part of our lives but the love doesn’t dissipate if it was ever there to begin with. Eros is a romantic love? Yeah right…That’s sex with a lot of passion. Not love.

The gods say love is not a feeling.  You choose to love. It’s a decision. So Kyle decided one day that he was going to love me and then when things didn’t work out as he planned, when I told him our relationship wasn’t worth the headache, when I stopped being able to talk to him and instead got his representative, that man his whole world told him he should be, that’s when he decided not to love me anymore? And ok, I’ll take that, but don’t tell me you loved me. Don’t tell me that’s what it was, because I don’t buy that “I love you” line. A month before the breakup I made plans for his birthday. Dinner reservations, tickets to a Nas concert, and a hotel room at the Hilton.

This is the way I see it. Love is an uncontrollable emotion. It comes upon you and when it does, it never leaves you. You don’t choose love. It chooses you and it comes with time. We can choose who we invest time in, who we spend time with, which in turn enables love to manifest itself, but the love?…nah we don’t choose that. Love is not dependent on circumstance or situation. It’s there regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen. We choose what to do with it. Because I love, I don’t want to hurt. I don’t want to disappoint. Not, I don’t hurt, I don’t dissapoint, and therefore I love.

I finally saw Kyle in all of his glory the day before his birthday. What started as a conversation about when we should get married, ended in a fist fight and me being thrown from a moving car. Love? That’s funny. He wouldn’t know love if it walked by naked in a pair of red pumps so I canceled the hotel reservation and went to that Nas concert alone.

*Name changed

Don’t agree with something I said? Follow me @ReeExperience

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Oftentimes, we look at infidelity as a product of one person in a relationship checking out and acting irresponsibly for selfish reasons; we envision the cheater as someone that decided he or she wanted something new. But as I see a lot of my friends settling down and getting married, I have come to observe that there is one motive for cheating that is rarely discussed: “settling.”

As I witness cousins, friends and associates getting engaged and married, I realized that I don’t know too many couples who are mutually and passionately in love. Of all the couples I know, I only admire the relationships of a handful of folks. Most couples I know consist simply of two people who just settled for one another or one who is more into the other.

Some of these women I know in these relationships always had a practical mindset when it came to love; some just had little hope of finding “the one” after 30; and some thought they just owed it to the man who loved them unconditionally. It makes me sad, really. I’m not a supporter of “settling.” Although I did admire the rationale behind the notorious book by Lori Gottlieb arguing that women needed to be practical about their expectations, I know that compromising emotions for the sake of practicality wouldn’t work for someone like myself. Although many people wouldn’t admit it, “settling” wouldn’t work for them either. What’s proof of this? Cheating and infidelity.

Like I mentioned, we envision a cheater as someone who got married and was in love, met someone else, and just moved on to the next. But settlers are the pre-cheaters. I look at a close friend of mine who is marrying a man who is madly in love with her. She’s not in love with him although she likes him. I fear the day when she comes across a man who evokes the passion she’s lacking in her own emotions for her fiance.

I imagine this happens all the time. The man who cheats with his co-worker and the woman who leaves her husband for a man she met on the plane potentially both have similar stories. When a person, who has settled, connects with another person that stirs up those passions, they don’t know how to handle things. It’s not like these scenarios have uniformly happy endings or sad endings; but what they almost always do is throw off someone’s balance in life and make them question their own personal state of affairs. When settling, you’re essentially putting yourself in the vulnerable position of temptations. When that part of your life is not truly fulfilled and satisfied, you may feel that there is a vacuum that needs to be filled.

So with all the talk of settling down, being practical, marrying someone who loves us more than we love them, etc, maybe we should think about the potential damage that can be caused by this rush to the altar. Understandably, I know there are some people who will be fully content with their decision to settle and never second-guess their decisions but I think for the most part, people desire the idea and feeling of true love.

Do you know anyone who’s cheated because they found true love after they got married? 

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Source: forharriet.com

Some of us still believe in true love, so we won’t accept anything less than the best when it comes to our romantic relationships. But others of us are either tired of waiting or no longer believe in true love. We asked our Facebook followers if they’ve ever settled in love and this is what they had to say.

Kirsten: I’ve considered it but God wouldn’t let me…and I’m so thankful for that!

Barbara: Yes, I have settled in love. I fell in love with someone that made less than I made. I was not really attracted to and we had different religious beliefs. Eventually, it ended after 5yrs because he looked at my money as his money and his money as his money. He also continually pressured me to adopt his religious beliefs and I had to get a divorce. It was like playing tug of war with him. We were undoubtedly unevenly yoked.

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I’ve been in some bad relationships—some I would even call toxic. And then I’ve been in some fully functioning, happy and healthy ones. And the major differences I saw between the two were these:

We live in a cynical world. As hardworking, single women there is little time for daydreaming or flowery thoughts of romance. The concept of true love seems like a Disney fantasy anyway; something that doesn’t fit into our modern, practical lives.  Although I have yet to find it for myself, I’m blessed to have family members and friends who have found true love. I believe it exists. I believe in true love when I see my friend’s husband beam when she walks into a room. I see it when my cousin’s husband drops a kiss on the nape of her neck when he thinks no one’s looking. I know it when my mother glows when my father tells an embarrassing joke.  Although all these relationships are very different, there are the commonalities in all my true love mentors: