Comment on Is it reasonable to tell a person you once loved about the fact years later?
Canconda@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
although I never loved anyone this much since.
Attraction /= love. You did not love her.
Yet all this time I had a desire to tell her about them.
You have a desire to have your attraction to her validated. You are essentially cat calling her but in ultra slow motion.
I would really want to cite some scientific study that “Over 80% of girls have their self-confidence lifted after being told they were secretly admired (p<0.05)”, but can’t find one.
Ya cuz in real life it would be “over 99% of women have experienced mental anguish from being told they were secretly admired.”
nitroemdash@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
I am pretty much sure my feelings fell under most common definitions of “love”. I wonder what makes you think otherwise.
Maybe that is a part of it, but I also want for her to be validated. I, for instance, would be if someone told me this.
From the tone of your post, I feel like you had a pretty bad day. I’m sorry for whatever happened to you, get better soon.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Life experience. You have lot of growing up to do.
nitroemdash@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
Do you mean the only factor you considered is my then-age?
I can testify with great confidence that I wasn’t remarkably attracted to her in a sexual way. In that regard I found her moderately cute, somewhat pretty, and a few girls and boys of our age much more so. My feelings were primarily platonic. They developed over the years and consisted mostly of platonic affection, the romantic attraction was the consequence of it.
amelia@feddit.org 1 hour ago
Finding someone cute or pretty is not the same as finding someone attractive. For example, Benedict Cumberbatch is definitely not pretty, but I find him quite attractive.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You’re self aware enough to ask the questions but lack the humility to accept the answers.
SnoopSqueak@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Other people do not know how you feel. It may well be love. But it may not be worth bringing up to her, she may get the wrong impression like others here. I wish society encouraged honesty, but I don’t know what’s best here.
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This person’s advice is comprehensive and correct. You need to accept it. What you’re feeling is not love. Love is something that is built up over years of being in a relationship. No relationship, no love. If what you’re feeling is as strong as you claim, then the correct word would be infatuation, or possibly obsession.
You’re going to come off as extremely creepy to her. Let it go.
nitroemdash@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
What?
From the Encyclopædia Britannica:
Romeo and Juliet never got to live as a couple. Were they not in love?
We knew each other for 11 years, were bonded by various class activities. I believe that’s enough for the proper and pure feelings to form.
nickiwest@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Citing the encyclopedia to describe love is like reading a dictionary to find out what the color red is. You’ll get a technically correct definition, but it doesn’t necessarily help with practical understanding.
I like the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it:
You may have loved her, in the sense that you felt affection toward her and wanted good things for her. Good friends, I would argue, should love one another in that way.
But this need to “confess” your feelings, seemingly out of the blue, after a long time apart, is not indicative of simple friendly, platonic love. This sort of “puppy love,” as we might refer to a youthful romantic interest or infatuation, is different from a true and lasting romantic love that grows from a mutual relationship.
Puppy love is not bad. It’s a normal part of growing up and learning to navigate romantic feelings and relationships. I’ll bet that most (if not all) of the people responding to you have experienced it, and as we have had more experiences with relationships and actually “falling in love” with other people, we have learned to tell the difference.
I can definitely point to a couple of long-term friends with whom I was infatuated as a teenager. I still feel a warm, platonic love for those people … but after having actually fallen in love, I can definitively say I was never “in love” with those people. I certainly don’t feel the need to reach out after years (decades, even) to tell them how I used to feel.
If you have not talked to this woman in years and she lives thousands of kilometers away, you have about a 1% chance of anything positive coming from your confession. If you’re not familiar with the Dobler/Dahmer Theory, it’s pretty simple. A grand romantic gesture will be well received if the recipient already finds the giver to be an acceptable potential romantic partner. If they don’t think of the giver in that way, it just comes off as creepy.
You have said that this woman was not romantically interested in you while you were acquainted. So that tells me you have better than a 50% shot of ending up on the “Dahmer” end of the scale.
Channel your energy into something more productive. Maybe get out into your community and find some affinity groups (hiking, coding, discussion, gardening, whatever floats your boat) and find some people you can connect with in the present instead of dwelling on the past.
Good luck!
(Apologies for the link to the random blog, but it’s the best source I found for explaining the phenomenon instead of just discussing the show where it originated. I heard about this theory years ago but I only learned today that it came from a sitcom.)
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Whatever you say, brother. We’re only here to provide advice. And so far, everyone’s advice seems to be on the same page. It’s your decision whether to take it.
I will however point out that, in fact, the modern consensus is that Romeo and Juliet were not in love and that it was, at best, a hormone-driven highschool crush that lasted less than a week
PapaSkwat@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
Dude, they weren’t real. That was fiction, not a documentary.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You’re… quoting an encyclopedia. On matters of romance and affection. You’re not coming across as “in love”; you’re coming across as infatuated. You’re in love with the idea of her, and the even more abstract idea of being in a relationship with her. I can just about guarantee you that reality is unlikely to fully match what you have in mind.
And… well, taken with your other replies and apparent reluctance to integrate and/or accept the rather consistent gist of the replies you’re getting, you’re starting to give off a wee bit of an incel vibe.
But anyways:
This isn’t a matter you can logically litigate. Human emotion is simply not a clean, cut-and-dried domain.
My further advice to you would be to focus on human connection first. Writ large, treat dating and romance as a side quest, not a primary quest. Focus on befriending people, and deepening interpersonal connection before anything else.
I don’t know what the nuance of the situation is, of course, but it sounds like you may have the opportunity to rekindle a friendship, and then see if it goes anywhere as things evolve. If you push really hard on the romance angle, especially if this is a very out-of-the-blue thing for her, you’re very likely to squick her out and nuke any chance of friendship, let alone anything more than that. Treat her as a human, and a friend, and then see where things go.
wizblizz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
tips hat
Ackchually milady, the eshiclopedia brihtannika says you’re wrong! Checkmate lib
laughs in incel
PapaSkwat@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
Exactly this!
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Genuinely think you’re arguing about semantics with the love/attraction thing. Like, you can profess your love to someone despite no romantic relationship existing yet.
It’s honestly irrelevant what term OP uses to describe their feelings.
Though I do agree with the 2nd paragraph.
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s not a matter of semantics, it’s a matter of drawing a distinction between 2 emotions that are often confused with each other. Call it whatever you want, but what OP calls love is clearly not what a regular person would consider to be love. This distinction, which has been made by several other people in this thread as well, is important because people will and often do justify being a creep as that they’re “in love.” See how already so much of OP’s argument hinges on the idea that he is in love? To be clear, he is very explicit that he is not just attracted to her - he is very clear that he believes he feels what a regular person would consider to be love.
Granted, in hindsight and given his responses so far, it seems unlikely that drawing this distinction would make a meaningful practical difference. But I fail to see how addressing one of the core parts of OP’s arguments can be considered as meaningless argument over semantics