Another man said that, after dating a girl for two years (and living with her for one), he had to let her go because he knew there would never be a real future between them.
"I was dating her and she was the perfect girlfriend, but the bond between us just wasn't strong enough. Our lives and values were just too different." A pity it took him a whopping two years to notice.
Now, the ex-girlfriend from the first story has begged me to answer the question: "How long does it take to fall in love? And do women fall in love more easily than men?"
I've never really asked the question before but she definitely got me thinking. Is the time it takes to fall in love two weeks, two months, two years or even two dates? And how do you know when it's lust, infatuation or an unhealthy obsession instead of the real thing?
For some lucky people, the attraction is pretty much instant - and mutual. Take NBA basketball star Lamar Odom. After meeting reality star Khloe Kadashian and getting to know her (apparently they were camped in a hotel room for the first week after they met), he proposed after knowing her for just 10 days. The two were married after just one month.
"I finally met the one that I knew if I had lost her, it would hurt the most," Lamar told reporters. Khloe's response? "I've just never felt deserving of this kind of attention before. Every single night before I go to sleep, he tells me how beautiful I am and how lucky he is to have me. I know it sounds cheesy, but I've never in my life met someone who I love this much. Lamar's devotion makes me want to cry because the only other person who gave that to me was my dad."
(Just an aside: he had also lost his mother to cancer at a young age and therefore their loss seemed to bond them instantly.)
While it's not exactly hard to tell a woman whom you've been sleeping with for 10 nights the things she wants to hear (and many men will do so in order to get into a woman's pants), what happens when the honeymoon period is over? What happens when days turn into months, years and then decades? Do they have enough of a foundation to stand on to allow their love to grow? And what if they find out they were never in love in the first place, but merely infatuated with one another? Either way scientists reckon that the love-at-first-sight thing could in fact be a very real phenomenon. According to professors at the University of Pennsylvania, when it comes to picking a suitable life partner, most of us generally don't know what we want.
So in order to find out what makes us attracted to one person and not another, they studied the habits of more than 100,000 people at speed dating events to find out just how the whole attraction thing works. While the participants had three minutes to get to know one another, the researchers discovered that decisions were usually made within the first three seconds.
The other surprising thing the scientists discovered was that, when people meet face-to-face, there are different criteria they judge a potential partner on as opposed to if they were reading a profile of them online or hearing a description from a friend.
Meeting face-to-face means that things such as bank balance, the car they drive or whether or not they smoke don't seem to matter. It was more about the chemistry and conversation between the two than their material assets.
Perhaps that's why, for many, internet dating doesn't work. People finding a partner online expect an instant attraction and believe the partner will embody every quality on their must-have list. But if there is no real spark between them in the flesh, they wonder if the system has got it all wrong.
Maybe it's time to go back to old-fashioned meeting ways after all ...
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