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It took me a very long time to learn the difference
between being in love with someone and actually loving that person. I
learned the hard way, the very, very hard way.
Hearts were broken repeatedly over the years, and
although I wish the pain could have been avoided, the experiences taught me
more than any book or class ever could.
I grew up on fairy tales and love stories that
taught me to believe that being in love and loving are the same thing. That
couldn’t be any further from the truth.
Being in love with someone and loving that person
are two different things. Understanding the difference and being able to apply
the knowledge to your own relationships is key to building a lasting
relationship.
Here are a few differences between being in love
and loving that I wish I knew a decade sooner:
When you’re in love with someone, you
want this person.
Being in love is wanting to own a part of the other
person. It’s believing this person is so wonderful that you want him or her to
be a part of your life, a part of you. When you fall in love with a person, you
feel an intense urge to consume that person in any way you can.
Being in love is believing you need someone in
order to be happy.
When you love someone, you need this
person.
You don’t just want — or rather, don’t only
want — you need him or her. You need this person to live a happy and healthy
life because your happiness literally depends on it.
You need him or her to be a part of your life in
some way or another, not because you want to own a piece of this person, but
because you want to give him or her a piece of yourself; loving someone is
deeming him or her worthy of owning a part of you.
It isn’t about ownership; it’s about wanting only
the best for that individual — something that often means letting that love go.
When you’re in love with someone,
your emotions are always on high.
Your brain is producing the most amazing chemical
cocktail, making you feel as if you were floating atop of a cloud. You get high
just by being in love with a person — and it’s a sort of high you never want to
let go of.
No one wants to come down from such a high. This is
where the problem lies: You inevitably do come down.
When you love someone, your emotions
settle and then fluctuate.
Loving someone isn’t as much about the emotions as
it is about the thoughts.
Thinking about someone, wishing the best for that
person, doing the best to make him or her happy and, well, caring for that
person just as much as — if not more than — yourself, that’s what love is. The
emotions that come with it are just the perks.
Once you have passed the stage of simply being in
love with someone to actually loving him or her, you have to learn to let go of
the constant high and to ride the less frequent waves as they come. They always
come. They just aren’t the “in love” emotional state that only falling in love
allows for.
When you’re in love with someone, you’re
aiming to reach some goal.
That’s what makes falling in love so exciting — the
constant yearning for more.
You want to spend more time with this person, get
to know him or her better, be with this person as much as possible. You always
want to have more, and want to build a greater, more serious relationship.
When you love someone, you aren’t
rushing to reach the finish line.
The goal that being in love calls for no longer
exists — but only because it’s already been reached. This often scares people
because they begin to feel a need to continue making progress.
Unfortunately, everything in the universe is
finite. You can’t make progress and continue building something greater
forever. The only thing you can eventually do is keep reinforcing what you already
have.
Being in love is not only understanding that what
you have is all you need, but wanting to strengthen that bond indefinitely.
When you’re in love with someone, you
think you care more about that person more than you actually do.
Falling in love is much, much easier than loving.
When you’re in love, the chemicals in your brain and body make you feel as if
the person is the greatest person in the world.
You believe this person to be the most amazing
specimen you have ever encountered. Sadly, this way of thinking usually wears
off as soon as the feel-good chemicals wear off. Then you’re left lost and
confused.
When you love someone, you care about
that person more than you think.
Being in love is easily recognizable, as it makes
you feel a constant yearning, a constant need. Loving, on the other hand,
doesn’t give you such constant reminders.
However, life always manages to give us those
reminders. Life will often keep people away from us, harm those in our lives
and sometimes even take them from us entirely.
When you truly love someone, such
moments of separation and loss overwhelm you with emotion. People often forget
how much they love a person — or fail to realize how much they love them —
until life forces them to remember.
When you’re in love with someone, you
can fall out of love with that someone.
What goes up must come down. In the case of falling
in love, what comes down often crawls back up. If you can fall in love with a
person then you know you can just as easily fall out of love with him or
her.
Being in love — and romantic love altogether — is
mostly a result of our minds’ creation. We make, or allow, ourselves to fall in
love by romanticizing the individual as well as the relationship. When you’re
in love, reality doesn’t always line up with your version of it.
When you love someone, you never
really stop loving that someone.
Loving a person is something that defines you — it
defines the person you are. Those we love, those we care about most, those who
mean the most to us, and who have affected us most in our lives, are those who
never really leave us.
They may remove themselves, or be removed, from our
lives, but they never leave our minds. Their memory, the thought of them, makes
us feel strong emotion. Their presence in our lives has had such an incredible
influence on us that, because of them, we are different people.
When you love someone, you can’t stop loving that
person because it would require you to stop loving a part of you yourself.
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