One hundred years ago, women didn’t have jobs. At that time, women got married because realistically, marriage was their job. But nowadays the society has changed: No one has to get married in order to survive. Therefore, the percentage of married people in modern society is not extremely high. I would argue that you will definitely be happier if you start an international relationship for real love rather than other reasons.

  • Why do people get married?

Some people get married for love. Some people get married for convenience. Some people get married due to fear of loneliness.

When I was in my 20s, I got married because I didn’t want to be alone. More specifically, fear of loneliness gave me the motivation to find a relationship and get married. Yes, I was much more motivated than other single people, but my motivation wasn’t quite right. To be more exact, my motivation wasn’t healthy. In other words, I got married for the wrong reason.

Consequently, that marriage only lasted for 4 years and I received the divorce certificate 5 years after the wedding.

If people get married for the wrong reasons, the divorce rate is certainly very high because circumstances change – when the factors that made people get married become absent, they simply get divorced easily.

That’s why I highly encourage you to start an international relationship only if you want to find love. 

But how do we define love?

As I see it, love means you are truly attracted to that person. You like that person’s values. You respect the way that person spends most of their time. You admire that person’s talent, intelligence, elegance and generosity. You appreciate that person’s kindness, innocence, affection and understanding. You just want to be with that person.

That is to say, you want to marry someone because of her qualities, not because of other external reasons.

That’s the very definition of love.

international relationship

  • How this theory applies to other areas of life:

In fact, this principle also applies to other areas of life. For example, when I was much younger, I was hired by a big organization which had an extremely high staff turnover. Further examination shows that organization’s key managers were incredibly difficult, so they couldn’t keep their staff.

I got that job because I tried really hard. I tried so hard because I had to have a job due to a personal reason. About 1.5 years later, I was bullied and harassed by a coworker that my line manager wanted to keep. My line manager’s plan was to keep both me and that coworker by getting me to do that coworker’s work for him because my coworker was incompetent. After doing his work for him for a year and a half, the ultimate reason why I needed that job became absent, so I didn’t need to be there anymore. I told my line manager that I was harassed by my coworker, and then the line manager insisted on reporting him to HR, although I asked her not to report him. Because my coworker was trying to take revenge, he made something up and reported me to HR. The HR officer was so naïve that she even believed him, so she gave me a written warning. I resigned on that day because I didn’t have to put up with that toxic workplace anymore. Further analysis indicates that I resigned because I got that job for the wrong reason. To be more precise, maybe I shouldn’t say that was the wrong reason as it was necessary at that time, but at least that was not the best/ideal reason.

After sending my resignation letter to HR and my managers, I was saying to myself, “What a relief!” Then I had some tears in my eyes because I actually liked the nature of that job (I still like the nature of that job) – I simply couldn’t stand the people that I was working with: When the HR drama got started, they were talking about moving me to another department of that organization, but I said no. Yet they insisted on asking me to go to another department, and then I said yes because I really didn’t like working with my line manager at that time (moving to another department was a way to avoid her altogether). However, after carefully thinking about that for a few days, I realized that moving to another department means I actually had to start to look for a new job, so why not start to look for a new job directly?

Then I resigned and got a new job fairly quickly. This time, I found a job for myself and my real passion instead of other reasons.

Similarly, if you look for an international relationship for genuine love, this relationship will be authentic and long-lasting.  

“What does real love mean to you?”