How you know if you’re in love?

Falling in love can be tricky. Sometimes you think you are in love, but what most people experience is lust. Also, a lot of people fall in love with the idea of love or just fall in love because they feel lonely. So how can we tell if it’s really love we’re feeling?

Check out this factors:

Love at first sight is not real love. This is what happens when we make unconscious assumptions about the person before us based on our experience of people we have known in the past. But just because something feels charged or familiar, it does not follow that it is “all good” even if it feels ‘right’: it might just be familiar.

There are other factors that add to this falling in love feeling – unromantic things such as a complementary immune system that we instinctively recognise via our olfactory systems, or facial symmetry which our most basic of instincts recognises as indicating general good health. At the end, we have to remember we are “animals”. We are still wild animals, with a thin coating of civilization/religion/technology on top. And what animals do? Procreate!

“A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.” Max Muller

Usually people fall in love while overlooking the good and the bad of the other. If you get this strong sensation which combines obsession with sexual attraction, it is not necessarily because the person we love is a good person or the right one for us, it only means unconscious forces are at work forcing us to see them through a filter (what I call this? everything is color pink) and this interfere with our reality. Knowing this, it’s important that people act more careful when they think they are “falling in love”.

SIGNS OF LUST

• You’re totally focused on a person’s looks and body.
• You’re interested in having sex, but not in having conversations.
• You’d rather keep the relationship on a fantasy level, not discuss real feelings.
• You want to leave soon after sex and not cuddling or breakfast the next morning.
• You are lovers, but not friends.

SIGNS OF LOVE

• You want to spend quality time together other than sex.
• You get lost in conversations and forget about the hours passing.
• You want to honestly listen to each other’s feelings, make each other happy.
• He or she motivates you to be a better person.
• You want to get to meet his or her family and friends.

Yes, you can fall in love with the person you experience that sexual attraction and obsession. When this happens, erotic love based in sexual attraction changes to mature love. But, this usually develops over a period between long-term couples and involves actively practicing communication, commitment, compromise and understanding. In here, you have to remember that no one is going to be exactly like you and you have to accept that the other is different and work it out.

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.” Bruce Lee

In order to love another I believe we also need a thing called, self-love. This is not as selfish, but a way of knowing who we are as a person and knowing what we can give to others. As Aristotle discovered, and as any psychotherapists will tell us, to care for others we need to be able to care about ourselves.

So love is not just a non-specific emotion that plays an elusive game with us. It is not merely something we passively fall into. It can consist of many things, from the erotic to the pragmatic. It can also be deeply intimate yet non-sexual to flirty to fun.

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” Lao Tzu

Love is not static. Feelings of love come and go just like feelings of sadness or happiness. It is commitment that couples make. The old cliché, ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’ describes a transition from one type of love to another. What it really means is ‘I’m moving on because I want to stay with erotic love and am not yet ready for pragmatic love’. But when we are ready for more than eroticism plus obsession we can have affection and sexual feelings which is more rewarding.

Tips:

• Love is something that takes time.
• Actions speak louder than words. It’s better to be with someone who says little but treats you lovingly than someone who praises you endlessly but behaves thoughtlessly.
• Try not spending some time with that person for about a day. Then record how you felt when you weren’t in their presence.
• Realize that there’s a difference between “loving someone” and “being in love.” You can love family, friends, etc., but being in love is much more intimate.
• Take your time; “love” isn’t a word that you should throw around.

Hope this information was useful. Have a good day! 🙂

xoxo,
Cristina

* Some of the info is from the Psychology today. Abril 13′ issue. Facts, facts!