This thread is for the broken hearted.

[Rodion Romanovich]

On the contrary it's a conclusion that gives hope and strength. Realizing the causes of failure in love and how it is connected to the shape of society and culture. Love in our civilization has become a strange combination of two seldom compatible things - organization of a household maintenance team, and sexual attraction - things that gives the partner finding problem another dimension, and severely restricts the options of partner you have. Many good relationships based on sexual attraction fail because the couple can't organize living together, and many men and women end up being abused as income-bringers to a partner they feel an obligation to help, while the other part is cheating on them and betraying them, often eventually leaving a lonely mother or father to bring up their children as if their children would be a piece of dirt. The only attempts the civilization has done to allow a separation of income and sexual attraction were cultures such as that of the hippies, involving problematic family situations with people cheating on each others to the left and right and abusing partners who would bring an income to them in the manner I described above, creating a quite disgusting situation for some who had to suffer both a broken heart, betrayal and backstabbing at the same time, and further humiliation and fear due to the fact that they had no method whatsoever of getting out of the hell that their situation was, and it also resulted in a wave of increase in the spreading of STDs, which is the black death of our days.

I think it gives a lot of hope and insight to realize how society structure and culture screws up love, just as society structure and culture can screw up survival with wars and genocides. It brings back self-esteem to those who have been victims of the many horrors of civilization. It's both a good basis for developing survival strategies within such a society form, and a good basis for political philosophy to solve the problems in society. It also makes you realize that many who made you suffer made you suffer out of stupidity and ignorance, and not out of deliberate malevolence, and that factors which they couldn't control forced them into certain ways of acting.

If you apply a historical perspective it becomes even more clear how society and culture repeatedly screws up love in different ways. Most people have actually been able to stand living in such societies and many eventually even got used to their situation in the end, but still the injustice and suffering is seldom entirely forgotten. Examples:
- sex slaves exposed to various forms of sadistic pleasures of an usually bored master who needed extreme forms of sex to be happy
- priests and nobles at times having a right to have either the first intercourse with the woman in a newly married couple, or just sex with any of their subjects they wanted to
- people being able to acquire power and money by semi-criminal behavior managing to steal women from men who were much more righteous and loving because those men had less money
- poor people having trouble surviving and thus being forced to "sell" their prettiest daughter to the rich in order to survive. Only very good-looking daughters were possible to sell to the rich.
- women being mass-raped in wars
- Goethe's "the sufferings of the young Werther" making huge amounts of young men commit suicide over unhappy love
- ideals at many times forcing men to fight with lethal weapons (rather than by hands) over women, resulting in much unnecessary death
- people using temptations and promises of sex to get what they want, but then betray the victim at the last minute
- bosses forcing subjects of the opposite sex have sex in order to get any chance at all of career
- people being forced by globalization and ruthless forms of taxation to move across countries, losing contact with each other and forcing many relationships to an end
- many quite decent people not getting any partners ending up with prostitutes, and demand for prostitutes ends up causing trafficking and other forms of suffering
etc.

As you can see, civilization doesn't exactly have a record of promoting happy, stable relations and true love, and it also doesn't really promote a fair and natural judgement of who should get who as partner - rather cruelty, backstabbing, brainwashing and random events in the end decide who you end up with in most cases, and uncertainty and taboo makes people who should really love each other fear making contact, or make some end up marrying the first one who actually asks, rather than the one they would most of all want to be asked by, because fear prevents those who should from asking.

There is hope, and it lies in the ability to change society to solve the problems. Or meeting a woman with the same insights who by realizing these things can compensate for them, so they become as if they didn't exist.