Love is Pleasure and Pain

I must say that I really like the idea of the lecture but the delivery of it was not as appealing as I would have liked or expected it to be. The discussion was excellent. What I really found interesting was the fact how its human nature to create an image of the perfect soulmate. Is there such a thing? And if so, how often does it happen? I would bet not often. Nonetheless we all have this idealized, romanticized image of our perfect soulmate and we compare this image to those we are in a relationship with, not realizing we are setting ourselves for failure and oh yeah, pain. I am guilty of this, big time. I have been with my boyfriend for quite a while (June will make it 5 years) and I have always tried , unsuccessfully to adjust who is to fit my perfect soulmate image. The pain of love is a very paradoxical statement but its very true. If we know creating the perfect image of a soulmate is setting up ourselves for failure, why is that we continue to do it? Is it perhaps the stories of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and Aladdin, that was engrained in us at a very young age and we get this idea that love is perfect and we can find a perfect soulmate. When we grow up, we see that these love stories hardly occur but the idea of being happy all the time, complenmenting each other, and feeling complete is associated with the perfect most-of-the-time non-exsistent soulmate so were steer towards this direction because it is better to have the hope of the perfect image than to be alone.