To help you navigate the choppy waters of how to find the girl for you or how to find the guy for you, find out some truths and myths of finding your true love and living happily ever after. Realize that your path is not strewn with roses, but you nevertheless have to walk together no matter how rough the road.

Finding a soulmate is often portrayed in rose-colored pages.  How to find love seems to be as easy as locking eyes with the person you bumped into the subway, saying “You had me at hello” or something to that effect, and walking off into the sunset, holding hands, while the credits roll. Truth is, when you are on a journey to answer that ever-important question “how can I find true love,” you might get disillusioned at some point.  To help you navigate the choppy waters of how to find the girl for you or how to find the guy for you, find out some truths and myths of finding your true love and living happily ever after.  Realize that your path is not strewn with roses, but you nevertheless have to walk together no matter how rough the road.

Myth: Finding a soulmate happens at first sight.

A lot of romantics believe in the “love at first sight” affair only to get disappointed that that “love” fades with time.  A few souls could getlucky, but they are in the minority.  Attraction can easily get mistaken for love, and a lot of people get cynical in the process, ruining their chances of how to find love again.

Truth: How to find love is seldom a bolt of Cupid’s arrow striking you in a lazy summer afternoon.

That has happened to a few, and they should thank their lucky stars.  Finding a soulmate, however, seldomdepends on luck.  It often starts with finding a person you can be friends with.  This means doing some legwork!  If you are still single after 40, could it be because you keep to yourself and your routine seldom includes places where crowds tend to gather?  How to find the girl for you or how to find the guy for you requires putting on your most flattering wardrobe, putting your best foot forward and taking up the courage to say hi and shake somebody’s hands; then moving forward from there.

Myth: How to find love culminates after we say “I do.  I will carry you on the threshold and we will live happily ever after.”

Truth: While some couples do honor the vow “’til death do us part,” very few Couples can sustain a relationship to the grave (just check the statistics for divorce) for the simple reason that it requires  work!

Couples who thrive despite the storm they have to go through understand that there is nothing easy about how to find love.  They evolve as a couple as they grow as individuals, and they are willing to pay the price.  More than love, they are often tightly bound by friendship that has seen good and bad.

Myth: I will give my all when love demands it.

Finding true love is (wrongly) equated with giving everything that you can without expecting something in return.  The more you can be self-effacing in a relationship, the more you can hold it up longer.

Truth: Finding a soulmate means staying true to yourself, finding your own light, growing outside the shadow of another, and becoming as big as you want, without breaking off the bridges you have built with the significant other.

How to find love requires a certain degree of foregoing your personal wants when doing so means the relationship will be better off for it.  It does not require, however, that you deny a good portion of you so the other will grow.  “Living happily ever after” means that each one gets the required nourishment he or she needs to sustain a relationship, and gives back the same nourishment to the common soil where they both grow.

Myth: Love will conquer all.

Love is the all-powerful force that binds us all, and we can’t go wrong with it as long as we love each other.

Truth: Love is the overarching force that keeps couples together, but it seldom works alone.

Long-term relationships are not just based on tender affection that we all associate with loving.  To ask yourself “how can I find true love” is to brace yourself for the long and arduous road ahead.  This means that you have to develop patience, forbearance, trust, willingness to meet the other person halfway, self-sacrifice (but not to the point that you lose who you are) and often,  forgiveness,  even in the most difficult circumstances.  How to find love does not just require feeling fuzzy all-over while looking at each other’s eyes, but gritting your teeth and plowing on when you hit a rough patch.