I don’t know many people who say that they don’t believe in true love, and I can’t name any that have said they’re not hoping to find it. Yet ask any of those people what true love actually is and you’ll find answers ranging from “I have no idea” to “well, it’s that thing I thought I felt in that time with the guy who got away.” I know I’m looking for it, but I’ll be damned if I have any idea what it really is. I think many would agree that they’re in the same boat. Yet how are we to find “true love” if we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for?

I couldn’t come up with a decent definition, so when in doubt, turn to the experts. Dictionary.com doesn’t have any entries for true love, although they do list truelove. Websters' truelove was the same. AskOxford.com was no help. Mind you, true love is a term – but one could hope! My backup plan was to check UrbanDictionary.com – a place to find a less-than-scholarly yet nonetheless entertaining definition. They have many suggestions listed there for “true love” but my favorite is “Love without need for sex, beauty, anything physical, or money. Often mistaken with a crush. No need for return of affection.” This has to be it, right? Can there be anything more pure than unconditional love? I think by looking at that one page, you can begin to understand how difficult it is to define something of such magnitude. Yet we jump online, click our way to our favorite dating site and search for something so specific yet foreign each and every day. It’s a wonder anyone ever finds it.

Divorce rates seem to tell the best tale of true love. Nearly half of all marriages end up in divorce. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find couples on their wedding day suggesting that it wasn’t true love that brought them there. It become clear that we live in a society where answers to some of our most profound questions still go unanswered. True, it may be that some questions have answers that will be different for all of us. That still doesn’t change the fact that nearly half of those who walk down the isle still haven’t found their own definition of true love.

Is true love just a myth – one of the things that come from the pages of children’s stories? Ask anyone whose marriage survives the test of time and they’d probably disagree. You may get some suggesting that true love isn’t easy – that it’s work like anything else. If that’s the case, why not write fairytales about it? These grand stories are supposed to inspire us and teach us about intrinsic truths. Maybe it’s because the love that is written about in stories just doesn’t exist. Maybe true love is intangible while real love is the best we can hope for.

True love is something that’s carried by Cupids wings – at least that’s the way I will imagine it. Perhaps it shall never have a definition that can be canned and shelved for anyone and everyone to use. Maybe it’s better that way. I still have to believe that true love is out there, though. I will search for it forever if I must. I know if I ever get to the alter that I will certainly be one of those that will stand screaming at the top of their lungs that I have found the purest joy. If it is a myth, than it is a good myth, and my hat is off to the Internet dating companies that help bring my true love a little closer each day.