4 Times Tom Robbins Perfectly Summed Up Dating

Love has been a prominent theme in the novelist’s works

1. ?When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on?series polygamy?until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”

Just do a Twitter search for #foreversingle if you aren’t aware of the desperation with which some people seek relationships. If you can’t be happy when you’re by yourself, no one else can provide a truly lasting happiness for you.

2. ?When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.?

The initial stages of an exciting new relationship?cause the release of neurotransmitters in your brain that create feelings we associate with love. In that sense, love is literally a drug. But, if you take the same amount of any recreational drug over a long period of time, your high will gradually diminish. So the longer you’re in a romantic relationship, the less your neurotransmitters will fire off. Many couples break up because they think they’re not in love anymore, when really they’re just not igniting the chemical reactions in the other person the way they used to.

So in addition to providing “our own fulfillment,” a successful long-term relationship must include a willingness by both people (or more if you’re into polygamy) to evolve the measuring sticks of love and happiness, because the physical passion will inevitably wear off.

3. ?Just because you’re naked doesn’t mean you’re sexy. Just because you’re cynical doesn’t mean you’re cool.?

This one made me think about guys who send dick picks, and the fundamentally wrong reason why most of them do it.

A man can walk down the street in any type of emotional state?? happy, sad, angry, depressed or anything in between?? but when he sees a billboard featuring a woman in her underwear, he’s immediately turned on. Women, however, are different. You have to “preheat the oven” (to quote Michelle from American Pie) before she’ll be aroused by your naked body.

As for the second part of this quote, I think we’ve all known at least one guy (or maybe you’ve been this guy) who tries to criticize someone or something, or act condescending, as a way to seem learned or sophisticated around women. But they end up coming off as insecure.

4. ?Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.?

There’s a difference between wanting to be in a meaningful relationship versus merely wanting to be in a relationship. People who complain about being single don’t realize that being single can be better than being with someone you’re not crazy about.