2. I never knew what love was until I met you, then when distance pulled us apart, I found out what true love is
3. I love you not because of anything you have, but because of something that I feel when I’m near you
4. The first time you touched me, I knew I was born to be yours
5. I still fall for you every single day
6. I like your last name. Can I have it?
7. I keep myself busy with the things to do but each time I pause, I still think of you
8. I knew the second I met you that there was something about you I needed. Turns out it wasn’t something about you at all. It was just you
9. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close
10. From the day you walked into my life, your all I think about. You’re the reason I breathe. You are the stars in my sky. I wouldn’t want this any other way. You’re the love of my life
11. When I think rain, I think about singing. When I think about singing, it’s a heavenly tune. When I think about heaven then I think about angels. When I think about angels, I think about you
12. I love you. You annoy me more than I ever thought possible, but… I want to spend every irritating minute with you
13. I have a lot of problems but they seem like they don’t exist when I am around you
14. You make me laugh even when I don’t want to smile
15. Your smile is like the sunshine and it brightens up my day. Your thoughts in my head create the sweetest melody and I can’t help but fall for you
16. Loving you never was an option – it was necessity
17. I am here, I will always be here. Watching you, loving you
18. A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love
19. You are my life. You are the only thing it would hurt to lose
20. Yes we are imperfect but true love will make everything perfect. There are few things in life that i care for beyond life, one of them is love and the other is you
Romantic love might seem like a mystery, but it's not really, at least most of the time — researchers have done their best to figure out what exactly it is that draws people together.
Psychologists have identified ten factors that can generally explain why we fall in love with someone, according to Elizabeth Phillips, a Ph.D. student in applied experimental and human factors psychology at the University of Central Florida.
Phillips gave a talk at the Nerd Night Global Festival about some of the ideas put forth in David Levy's book "Love+Sex with Robots." Levy has written about exactly what makes us fall in love, and his list of the ten factors involved does a great deal to explain just how the falling-in-love process works.
Here's what it takes:
1. Similarity. As Phillips explained, we find it easy to imagine that someone who is similar to us will like us back.
2. "Reciprocal liking." Most of the time, we want someone who likes us back. This is another easy one to explain — we enjoy the feeling of being wanted.
3. Desirable characteristics. This covers a lot of what we find attractive in the first place: appearance and personality. Phillips explains that people rate the importance of these factors differently: some people might love a great personality and others might value appearance more, but we all have aspects of personality or physical attractiveness that we find important.
4. Social acceptability. Someone has to fit into whatever category of people we think it's acceptable for us to fall in love with. Phillips calls this "social influences," and says that explains the cultural norms and limiting factors about who we can fall in love with — like whether or not someone is within an acceptable age range for us. These norms have changed significantly over time.
5. Need fulfillment. Some of us need someone we can be close and intimate with, others are after the boost in social status that might come with a certain partner. Whether you need a cuddle or a trophy, the people that we fall in love with generally meet some sort of need in our lives.
6. "Arousal" situation. No we're not talking about sex here (most of the time), but being in an exciting, stressful, or dangerous situation that gets your adrenaline going with another person is a bonding experience that's associated with falling in love.
7. X-factor. Someone has to have that special something that turns us on. For some of us, this might be shapely legs or eyes you get lost in, for others, a killer sense of humor. We've all got specific characteristics that we find attractive and we tend to fall in love with people who have those characteristics.
8. Relationship readiness. Someone has to be psychologically at a point where they would choose to enter a relationship. A great example is right after a person has exited another relationship — the rebound effect.
9. Alone time. This factor, exclusiveness, is essential for falling in love. Spending time alone with someone makes it easy to get close to them.
10. An air of mystery. While we do tend to become attracted to people we like that we spend a lot of time with, there's something intriguing about people that are in some ways mysterious to us. This could help explain a draw to a person who comes from another culture, or as Phillips explains, it might also be the weird reason some people become infatuated with criminals.
Every time we fall in love, we start a cycle of beginning and ending, of rebirth and death.
The person you are changes as the way you perceive your love changes. As the way you look at your lover changes over the years, so does the person that you’ve become. Not every love must necessarily end in darkness, but I’d argue that your first love necessarily does.
If falling in love the first time and failing to keep the love alive doesn’t change you a few shades darker, then you probably haven’t yet experienced love.
Life and love are beautiful because of the seemingly paradoxical contrasts they allow for. With beauty there is ugliness. With light there is darkness. With pleasure there is pain. With life there is death.
Falling in love teaches you that without one, you can’t have the other. This is what makes relationships so damn complicated. Yet, it’s also what makes falling in love so perfect.
Love isn’t all rainbows and butterflies — where there is light, there is darkness looming around the bend.
If love was all good feelings and happiness then — let’s be honest — we wouldn’t find it nearly as intriguing as we do. It’s because we know the dark path that loving often leads us on that we find ourselves so entranced. Just as love reveals all the good in you, it also reveals all the bad. It reveals the darkness that lies in your soul.
We all have that darkness inside us — we just aren’t familiar with it until we’ve loved. We find ourselves fighting this inner struggle of selfishness and selflessness, a fight that more often than not leads to everyone losing and no one winning.
We try to both be independent and at the same time a part of a bigger whole. We get confused. Find ourselves lost and questioning the new reality that falling in love has created for us. Is it real? Or is it all just an illusion?
Imagine… falling in love builds you an entirely new world, an entirely new reality, a new truth. Then, down the line when things get more complicated and less black and white, we begin to lose sight of that novel reality. It all begins to get fuzzy and our uncertainty punishes us; it hurts.
It hurts to think that the love of you life, your world, isn’t what you believed it to be. It hurts to even think that everything that you’ve believed to be true may have all been in your imagination. The life you’ve just begun is about to end and a newer, darker version of you begins to take form.
It reveals you to yourself. Falling in love feels like a new beginning because that’s exactly what it is. When you fall in love for the first time, you get to meet yourself for the first time in your life.
You experience emotions and thoughts that you never before could believe existed inside you. You see your vulnerability and your need for having a particular person in your life. The moment you fall in love is the moment you realize you aren’t enough.
We all “know” that people need other people in their lives in order to be happy, but not until you fall in love do you realize how deep that need goes. Nor do you realize how far you will go to get the person you desire.
Falling in love makes us do things, say things and believe things we never expected we’d be capable of doing, saying, believing. It pushes us to extremes we may not have even thought we were capable of. It can, and often does, also introduce us to a much darker side of the soul.
Falling in love isn’t just starting a new chapter in your life.
It’s starting a new life entirely. What people often fail to realize is that the moment you fall in love is the moment you stop being the person that you were. You change. Think about what makes you, you.
Sure, you have all the physical attributes. But more importantly, what makes you the person you are, is the way that you experience and interpret the world around you.
What makes you the unique individual you are isn’t just your looks or your abilities. It isn’t even only the experiences you’ve had and the things you’ve seen. What makes you the person that you are right now is the way you experience the world and how you interpret that which you experience.
That which you give most importance to and that which you find to be trivial are the two things that define the person that you are. Falling in love causes you to shift your entire perspective. It changes you because it changes the entire way that you see the world.
21 Ways You Can Know That What You’re Feeling Is Really True Love
Love is a pretty powerful drug. When you feel it, you really feel it. It can suspend time, making the whole world seem still except for you two.
It feeds you more than any nourishment; you feel full in the presence of love.
But there’s a vast difference between love and true love. True love knows no depth. It’s an endless tunnel that sweeps you up in the whirlwind and you’re never quite free from it. It stays with you. And you hope this person will too.
True love isn’t ordinary. It doesn’t come around often and that’s how you’ll know it’s genuine.
….Or, you know, you could read this list and find out for yourself. Here are the 21 signs you are truly in love with your partner:
1. You see something and instead of thinking how happy it makes you, you think about how happy it would make them.
2. You feel more at home with them than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. Even when you were 7 and had all the stuffed animals in the world.
3. You find yourself singing Macy Gray at various times throughout the day.
4. You can get all-out mad or depressed or happy or whatever it is that you are in front of them. And you know it won’t change how they feel about you.
5. Patience: It doesn’t matter how long it takes for them to understand something, you enjoy spending the time teaching or learning from them.
6. You have the option to wear your go-to outfit, but still take an extra five minutes to get ready.
7. You live for their quirks. You love that they take up the entire dance floor when they break a move. You love that you can’t share meals because they hate chicken. You love that they will discuss celebrities like they’re your real friends. You’d much rather have them be weird than anyone else.
8. You still go over to their place no matter how late at night it is and how tired you feel. It’s always worth it.
The World’s Best Definition of Love
Okay, I guess I should have added “in my opinion” to the title. But everything on this blog is my opinion. I searched online for a definition of love and the results were muddled and confusing. Some even stated sexual desire was love. Really?
The reason there are so many varying and contradictory definitions is because love is not being studied. It’s been explored in countless poems, musical lyrics and other artistic endeavors, but there has been very little hard research, investigation or analysis of love.
There’s an accepted mindset that love is indefinable. I find this beyond weird. Love! One the most extraordinary and satisfying experiences we can have as human beings. We’re like engineers who never bothered to study math. It doesn’t make sense.
Taking off from Brene Brown’s work, let’s start the discussion and answer the question…
What is love?
“An intangible connection between two people that feels exceptionally good.”
The strength and depth of the connection is determined by two conditions.
The level of self-acceptance each person has for themselves.
How open, honest and exposed each individual is willing to be.
Qualities always present with these connections are:
Trust – believing in their integrity and good intentions towards you.
Respect – concluding they are good and worthy of appreciation.
Affection – demonstrating your good intentions through your actions.
Love is not an emotion. Love is the connection. Your feelings are a reaction to the quality of that connection.
Loving Yourself First
The part I find most interesting in this definition is the conditions that make love more powerful. First, self-acceptance. You’ve heard the phrase “you can’t love someone more than you love yourself.” What exactly does that mean and how does it work?
If there are aspects of yourself you reject, these issues are your hot buttons. They’re a source of discomfort. When someone hits or gets near one your buttons, you’ll unmindfully react to the discomfort with blame, shame, disrespect and withhold your affection until the discomfort dissipates. So even if you are a parent who profoundly loves your child, you will not be loving towards them when they tickle your insecurities.
If this is true in a parent-child relationship, considered by many the most intense version of love a person can experience, you can imagine what it’s like with a friend or lover. If they trigger something painful inside you, you’ll react with fear, hurt or anger, not love. That’s why accepting all of yourself, creates ideal conditions for experiencing more and deeper love. There’s less button-stuff to get in the way.
Letting It All Hang Out
The second condition necessary is openness. Think of two people you feel the closest to in your life. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I bet one of the common denominators in both relationships is – you have let them see who you really are. They have witnessed you being strong, capable and exceptional, but they have also seen you be scared, neurotic and weak. You’re honest with them about what you’re facing and feeling. You let it all hang out. It’s not surprising the love is palpable, it’s real! Love is genuine when you take off the masks, otherwise it’s a ruse. All of us crave truth and relationships that are real.
With most everyone else, you hide your imperfections. When you don’t let someone see the icky parts of you, you question their love. Would they love me if they knew I was [ fill in the blank ]? This unanswered question lingers between the two of you as an impenetrable web. Open up to them and the barrier easily splits in two. The more you let them know your shortcomings, AND they stick around, the more powerful the love.
Being honest and open is not easy. Working at being at peace with the things you wish weren’t a part of you is hard work. Not only is it a tough internal process, but you’re also working against a culture that doesn’t understand, appreciate or support these changes. You’ll need to be Don Quixote, fighting dragons only you can see and tilting at windmills as far as anyone else is concerned. Be prepared, you’re going to get bumped around.
In the end, the love you experience will make it all worthwhile. You might end up having less relationships, but the ones you have, will be infinitely more precious. Try it and see for yourself
What is Love
What is Love – Seasoned Feelings
Ask any teenager or senior citizen, “What is love?” and their answers reflect a similar influence. Love involves feelings -- romanticized by music, literature, and media. We all yearn to recreate that intimacy based on what seems so ideal. Our deepest longings shape what defines love -- fervor (passionate), flawless (perfect), and fulfillment (joy).
When we express love, we develop a strong emotional attachment, anticipating our love to be returned. What do I receive out of the relationship? What’s my level of contentment? Our feelings focus upon discovering that one individual who satisfies all our heart’s desires. Sadly, what nourished and warmed our love for one season often withers and grows cold. “The course of true love never did run smooth.”1
What is Love – The Cost of Giving
What is love if not costly? Real love demands sacrifice that can’t be found in self-centeredness. You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. Sacrificial love requires that we give what we value most: our hearts, minds, souls, and strength. Real love does not always follow our natural inclinations; it is not an impulse from feelings.
Love can only be understood from the actions it prompts. When we bear with the failings and weaknesses of others, divine love reveals itself (Ephesians 4:2). At all costs, this love compels us to give so that we alleviate the suffering of others. Instead of seeking to fulfill our emotional and physical needs (receiving), we humbly give of ourselves (1 Peter 3:8–9).
What is Love – God’s Nature
In a response to, “What is Love?” it is erroneous to say “love is God.” God created love, not the reverse. He deliberately chose to express His love to us -- revealing the very nature of God Himself.
God Is Sacrificial – God initiated an eternal love relationship with us before we loved Him (1 John 4:10).
God Is Merciful – God extended the wealth of His kindness even when we were undeserving of His love (Ephesians 2:4-5).
God Is Faithful – Even in the most extreme circumstances, God’s love for us remains secure (Romans 8:35, 38-39).
God did not need to create the universe. He made that choice as an expression of His ultimate love for us. Then God created us a certain way -- to experience all that perfect love was meant to be (Song of Songs 4:9-10; 8:6; 1 John 4:7-12).
21 Ways You Can Know That What You’re Feeling Is Really True Love
1. You see something and instead of thinking how happy it makes you, you think about how happy it would make them.
2. You feel more at home with them than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. Even when you were 7 and had all the stuffed animals in the world.
3. You find yourself singing Macy Gray at various times throughout the day.
4. You can get all-out mad or depressed or happy or whatever it is that you are in front of them. And you know it won’t change how they feel about you.
5. Patience: It doesn’t matter how long it takes for them to understand something, you enjoy spending the time teaching or learning from them.
6. You have the option to wear your go-to outfit, but still take an extra five minutes to get ready.
7. You live for their quirks. You love that they take up the entire dance floor when they break a move. You love that you can’t share meals because they hate chicken. You love that they will discuss celebrities like they’re your real friends. You’d much rather have them be weird than anyone else.
8. You still go over to their place no matter how late at night it is and how tired you feel. It’s always worth it.
9. You don’t desire other people. Yes, you might find some of them attractive, but no part of you wants them.
10. Their happiness means more than your own.
11. You willingly give in to the things you normally don’t compromise on.
12. You never grow tired of their company. It’s always just better when they are there. Even if you two don’t fill the silence, you’re content simply knowing they are present.
13. You have moments of insecurity but their reassurance makes you realize it doesn’t matter. Only when they say things will be fine do you genuinely believe it.
14. You associate certain scents with them. Cut grass reminds you of the time after your morning run. Football leather brings you to autumn evenings spent playing catch in the leaves. And don’t get us started on the smell of their pillow….
15. You dream of all the ways you can take care of them more than you dream of all the ways you want them to take care of you.
16. You never don’t want to listen to them – even when they sing Motown absolutely terribly in the shower.
17. When you do fight — it’s part of loving someone — you truly don’t want to be mad at them. You don’t talk badly about them after it’s resolved either because you know their actions came from a good place.
18. As if it’s even possible, you find them to be even cuter when they are sleeping. (I promise this isn’t creepy…)
19. They can come at you with anything — news, secrets, maybe even a baseball bat — and you won’t judge or hate them for it.
20. You wake up happy if only because you get to see them that day.
21. Neither of you think about Channing Tatum during sex.
"What is love" was the most searched phrase on Google in 2012, according to the company. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the question once and for all, the Guardian has gathered writers from the fields of science, psychotherapy, literature, religion and philosophy to give their definition of the much-pondered word.
The physicist: 'Love is chemistry'
Guardian
Biologically, love is a powerful neurological condition like hunger or thirst, only more permanent. We talk about love being blind or unconditional, in the sense that we have no control over it. But then, that is not so surprising since love is basically chemistry. While lust is a temporary passionate sexual desire involving the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and oestrogen, in true love, or attachment and bonding, the brain can release a whole set of chemicals: pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and vasopressin. However, from an evolutionary perspective, love can be viewed as a survival tool – a mechanism we have evolved to promote long-term relationships, mutual defence and parental support of children and to promote feelings of safety and security.
• Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist and science writer
The psychotherapist: 'Love has many guises'
guardian.co.uk
Unlike us, the ancients did not lump all the various emotions that we label "love" under the one word. They had several variations, including:
Philia which they saw as a deep but usually non-sexual intimacy between close friends and family members or as a deep bond forged by soldiers as they fought alongside each other in battle. Ludus describes a more playful affection found in fooling around or flirting. Pragma is the mature love that develops over a long period of time between long-term couples and involves actively practising goodwill, commitment, compromise and understanding. Agape is a more generalised love, it's not about exclusivity but about love for all of humanity. Philautia is self love, which isn't as selfish as it sounds. As Aristotle discovered and as any psychotherapist will tell you, in order to care for others you need to be able to care about yourself. Last, and probably least even though it causes the most trouble, eros is about sexual passion and desire. Unless it morphs into philia and/or pragma, eros will burn itself out.
Love is all of the above. But is it possibly unrealistic to expect to experience all six types with only one person. This is why family and community are important.
• Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and author of Couch Fiction
The philosopher: 'Love is a passionate commitment'
Public domain
The answer remains elusive in part because love is not one thing. Love for parents, partners, children, country, neighbour, God and so on all have different qualities. Each has its variants – blind, one-sided, tragic, steadfast, fickle, reciprocated, misguided, unconditional. At its best, however, all love is a kind a passionate commitment that we nurture and develop, even though it usually arrives in our lives unbidden. That's why it is more than just a powerful feeling. Without the commitment, it is mere infatuation. Without the passion, it is mere dedication. Without nurturing, even the best can wither and die.
• Julian Baggini is a philosopher and writer
The romantic novelist: 'Love drives all great stories'
guardian.co.uk
What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air – you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all consuming, a physical pain. Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country. It is the point before consummation of it that fascinates: what separates you from love, the obstacles that stand in its way. It is usually at those points that love is everything.
• Jojo Moyes is a two-time winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year award
The nun: 'Love is free yet binds us'
Catherine Wybourne
Love is more easily experienced than defined. As a theological virtue, by which we love God above all things and our neighbours as ourselves for his sake, it seems remote until we encounter it enfleshed, so to say, in the life of another – in acts of kindness, generosity and self-sacrifice. Love's the one thing that can never hurt anyone, although it may cost dearly. The paradox of love is that it is supremely free yet attaches us with bonds stronger than death. It cannot be bought or sold; there is nothing it cannot face; love is life's greatest blessing.
