The Myth of True Love: Is It Really Attainable? by İdil Gökçek

 

The Myth of True Love: Is It Really Attainable?

Love is often presented as something that truly exists and is merely a matter of coincidence or destiny. From fairy tales where a handsome prince saves a princess, to films where characters fall in love instantly in cafés or bookstores, and songs that describe love as an overwhelming, consuming reason to live, love has always been central to the stories we grow up with. Literature, cinema, and popular culture all encourage the idea that "true love" is real, universal, and destined. However, romantic love may be more complicated than these stories suggest; it may not be simple, immediate, or guaranteed, but instead shaped by expectations, timing, and the way we learn to understand it in the first place. Although shaped by cultural expectations and idealized in stories, this raises the question of whether true love is genuinely attainable in real life or primarily a cultural construction shaped by storytelling traditions.

In modern culture, the idea of a "soulmate" feels completely natural, but to understand why, one must look back to classical antiquity, where the belief that humans are searching for a missing half is deeply rooted. In his Symposium, Plato presents a myth through Aristophanes' speech, suggesting that humans were originally whole, round, and self-sufficient beings with four arms, four legs, and one head with two faces. Because these original humans were arrogant and ambitious enough to scale the heavens and attempt to overthrow the gods, Zeus split them into two. Since that moment, humans have been left permanently separated, spending their lives searching for the other half that will make them whole again. In the same text, however, Socrates rejects this theory, arguing that love is not about finding a soulmate but is rather an ascension toward enlightenment. According to his concept of the ladder of love, love starts as a physical attraction to one beautiful body, turns into loving all beautiful bodies once one realizes physical beauty is connected, and evolves into loving beautiful minds and laws or ideas. Ultimately, this ladder reaches the pure, abstract “Form of Beauty,” making love an instrument used to reach wisdom. 

Contrasting with Plato and Socrates, Sappho wrote about love as a visceral, almost violent physical force. In her poetry, she described love, or Eros, as "sweetbitter" (glykypikron), coining a word that combines the opposite sensations of sweet pleasure and desire with bitter pain and suffering. For Sappho, love is an emotional contradiction and an overpowering, chaotic "limb-loosener" that strikes without warning. In ancient Roman thought, Ovid threw out both philosophy and heavy romantic agony. In his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), he argues that love is strictly a game of seduction, and in Amores, Book 1, Poem 9: Love is War, he famously states "Militat omnis amans," meaning “every  over is a soldier.”  To Ovid, love is a battlefield, a hunt, and an art form that can be learned, practiced, and mastered through strategy and technique rather than destiny. Thus, ancient philosophy framed love as a paradox—a search for wholeness, a battlefield, a violent physical force, and a way to reach wisdom —that continues to challenge the concept and meaning of love today.

Throughout the centuries, love continued to evolve, transitioning from divine madness in ancient philosophy to a noble pursuit, a rebellion against rationalization, and a means of self-fulfillment. In the medieval era, love was deeply shaped by social hierarchy and a religious worldview, rather than personal happiness. Courtly love was the dominant model in aristocratic literature; it was forbidden, directed toward an idealized, often married noblewoman, and structured around distance, longing, and devotional submission that reflected feudal society.  Love was also spiritualized under Christian thought, where desire became a moral test or purification. In texts like Dante's Divine Comedy, love is depicted as a path to divine truth rather than earthly satisfaction. The early modern era—marked by the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance, and the Reformation—introduced a shift where love became more psychological and individual, though still constrained by social order. Renaissance humanism tied love to personal identity and interior feeling, making it deeply psychological and unstable; writers like Shakespeare placed love in tension with family, politics, and honor, revealing it as a force that could be both creative and destructive. By the Enlightenment, the tension between passion and reason turned love into a struggling emotion against social and rational constraints, moderated by rational choice.

In the modern era, true love became fully internalized, psychological, and shaped by rapid industrialization, urban life, and changing social structures. Framed as central to personal identity, it became a matter of existential personal choice. However, modern literature began to deconstruct this romantic idealism, illustrating that love was no longer guaranteed to be stable. Because of miscommunication, alienation, and social pressure, love could fail, and it was frequently marked by isolation within intimacy and a tension between desire and reality. Writers like Tolstoy and later modernists showed that true love might be tragic, unattainable, or an illusion while Freud and psychoanalysis reshaped the understanding of love as being driven by unconscious desire, loss, and repetition. Over centuries, love moved from an external, religious, and social structure to an internal psychological experience, before becoming increasingly uncertain in its meaning and outcome.

In today's social media-dependent world, the meaning of true love has changed like never before. With the arrival of the digital age and the rise of social media addiction dominating society, love has become more fluid, fast, and ambiguous, characterized by less stability and weaker boundaries. Communication patterns, such as reply times, online presence, and visibility, now shape relationships, causing physical interaction to lose its value. This transformation altered the rules of engagement and gave rise to a new, cynical vocabulary defining different types of love and interaction. The "situationship" is the ultimate postmodern relationship; it is unclear, undefined, chaotic, and confusing, mimicking intimacy without commitment. Much like an experimental text, a situationship exists only in the present and avoids commitment to a grand narrative. "Ghosting" refers to a sudden, unexplained disappearance from communication, functioning as an ambiguous ending. Often resulting from a lack of shared connection, ghosting allows individuals to treat each other as disposable, deleting people from their lives as easily as closing a browser tab. "Love bombing" and "gaslighting" thrive in a digital ecosystem where reality is easily manipulated. Love bombing uses excessive early affection to create a manipulative emotional dependency, while gaslighting is a psychological manipulation designed to make a person doubt their own reality or perception to assert power and dominance.

In this manipulative, insecure, and problematic digital landscape, believing in a fairy-tale concept of love feels extremely absurd. When algorithms calculate compatibility and relationships can be erased with a block button, digital culture fosters emotional uncertainty and constant interpretive anxiety. Experiencing a perfect, destined, and conflict-free romance is unrealistic because modern relationships are shaped by choice, speed, and constant alternatives that create instability. Social media and digital communication exacerbate this by leading to misinterpretation, comparison, and emotional overthinking, making relationships even more fragile. Concepts like ghosting, situationships, love bombing, and gaslighting showcase the profound problems in modern relational attempts, yet they also highlight that people are increasingly aware of emotional dynamics and boundaries. Despite the negative contributions of the digital age, modern love allows for greater emotional honesty and intentional choice, as relationships are no longer maintained by pressure or necessity.

Ultimately, true love—understood as mutual commitment, emotional consistency, clarity, and trust built over time—remains possible, though it is more dependent on effort and awareness than on external structures. There is optimism to be found: when two people actively choose clarity, communication, and care, true love might be attainable. Modern conditions do not prevent true love; they simply make it more conscious and less automatic.