We're not in love anymore

Arranged marriages aren't good right!? Marry for love,  isn't that the only true way?
Is it?
I'm a middle class white male in the western world and you are only with someone because you love them right? Right?

Is Tinder the new arranged marriage? But instead of parents or culture or class or society choosing for you, you are choosing out of a lineup.  Free will,  hardly like arranged marriage right? Right? But is it still like an arranged marriage when you kind of fall into relationships because you want to be with someone...  Do you love love more than loving that person? Do you really know that person? You date on a premise - I'm wanting a relationship - I have another 10 prospects in the waiting room - it used to be like fishing, you take your time,  you fish in a certain way in a certain place at a certain time, and when you catch that right fish,  you're so excited,  it's got all your attention and energy,  nothing else matters...  Tinder is like fishing with a net...  See what crap you scoop up and dump it all to go again...  It's not a hobby like fishing is, it's now a job,  a commodity,  a slave to a system,  a treadmill...  Is dating really about love? Or desperation,  fulfilling a feeling,  a hole...
So many you don't love them - they just give you what you 'need'

Break up the routine, here's why.

Shake up the routine.

According to Sternberg, our interactions in close relationships tend to go along in well-worn grooves, called scripts. Most emotion is the result of some interruption of the script. Keep doing the same old thing, and you experience no emotion. But stop what you’ve always done, and, suddenly, someone feels. Sternberg says you can find out if a relationship is “live” by generating something unexpected, such as one of you going away o their own, or going on a vacation to a new place together. But sometimes it takes extreme action to realize how much intimacy there is, or was. Why not plan for occasional minor interruptions—so you don’t need a major one to wake you up?

Your childhood determines your love life later on.

From an article 'do opposites attract?' for me this direct question isn't as relevant as the other info it provides...  Here's some exerts I thought most relevant and eye opening to ourselves and our romantic choices...

Hudson and Fraley took their investigation an intriguing step further. Given that attachment fundamentally shapes how people function in romantic relationships, they wanted to test whether adult attachment style influences the association between partner similarity and relationship satisfaction. (The participants also completed an attachment questionnaire.)

Attachment develops from the relationship between infants and their caregiver, with particular respect to responsiveness and availability. The effects of early attachment are far-reaching, establishing how we perceive ourselves and others as we grow into adults. In broad terms, individuals who experience loving and consistent early caregiving developsecure attachment, while those who receive harsh and/or inconsistent treatment from their early caregivers develop insecure attachment.

****Insecure attachment breaks down into two types:

Those who are high on attachmentavoidance believe that others will not respond to their needs, and correspondingly have a negative view of others. They tend to avoid intimacy, and are ill at ease when they feel their partner is too close.Those who are high on attachment anxietyare preoccupied with how available others are, and have a negative view of themselves. They seek out intimacy and contact with others, and can often be cloying or “needy” in their relationships.

(Securely attached people are low on attachment avoidance and anxiety, and demonstrate higher levels of adjustment in their relationships.)

The results were striking. Highly avoidantpeople seemed to be most satisfied with their relationships when the personalities of the partners were moderately similar. The researchers interpret this finding as possibly reflecting a level of “counter-dependence” with which avoidant people are comfortable. Put another way, an optimal balance of similarities and differences may help avoidant people keep intimacy at bay.

But for highly anxious people, it was a different story. They experience greater levels of relationship satisfaction with partners who are either highly similar or dissimilar to them. Hudson and Fraley speculate that similarity offers anxious people the feeling of “oneness” that they crave with their significant others, while dissimilarity may encourage “reliant dependence” on their partners. For the anxiously attached, having a dissimilar partner may be a way to compensate for one's own shortcoming, say the researchers.

Read full article
http://psychologytoday.com/blog/head-games/201412/do-opposites-really-attract-its-complicated?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost