Infatuation versus love is obviously relevant to the conversation but assuming one has honestly examined that distinction and still considers themselves to be in love, is it possible to be wrong about that?
I know that a person can be in love and keep the magnitude at bay (especially in a presumed unrequited situation) but once you cross the threshold and know that you are in love with someone, is there a valid argument that you can be wrong? I also know that the idea of a relationship with someone can be quite different from the reality of the same relationship so I acknowledge that love can end rapidly.
Still, I contend that a person who believes themselves to be in love is in love and that fact is unassailable as long as they believe it to be true. I know that not all people agree with me on this matter. What do you think?
Well you being in love (for yourself) isn’t really meaningfully subject to external diagnosis. Re problematic love scenarios there are number of ways you can be “in love” attraction-infatuation wise and assuming your are a rational person possessed of reasonable intelligence you can predict, based on common sense, that it will likely not end well if pursued.
In this sense your feelings of love can’t really be assessed as incorrect or “not really love” but they can (depending on circumstances) be evaluated to be a really bad idea you should not indulge yourself in. That interior analytical brake doesn’t stop everyone, but it does stop a lot of people, and if you pull your focus off that person you often find the intense “love” attraction just fades away over time. Was it “real love”? Who can say.
I don’t think someone who has matured out of the teenage crush years can be in a unrequited situation and still feel love. If they do something else is going on.
I would say that people can be mistaken about whether they’re in love; but you’ll never know they’re wrong because no one else is in a position to their feelings better than they do.
Thank you for your thoughtful response, astro. You’ve articulated exactly where I am in the process but I definitely took the long road to get here.
I don’t disagree. I was fine with things when I presumed no mutual attraction. The problem started when I found out that I was wrong about that. A week before she moved thousands of miles away to another continent. We were together before she left, but very briefly.
You are saying that mental illness does not exist. What if I feel that the only way I can love someone is to kill them and consume their bodies. I’ve identified the object of my desire, and am in the process of consummating the emotion. Am I in love?
I’d be careful about reading to much into getting busy a week before she moved away. The opportunity to have some no strings intimacy with someone you feel safe with but might not want to pursue a relationship with is hard to pass up. Moving away is a powerful aphrodisiac.
The problem with this statement is that love is a concept and, as such, cannot be defined. Your concept of love, or circumstances that trigger the feeling of being in love, is going to differ from everyone else’s in at least some aspect. Since it can’t be defined it also can’t be dealt with as fact/fiction.
On a factual basis, we know that an increase in the hormone oxytocin is strongly associated with the concept, or feeling, of love. The problem with that, though, is that there are many reasons other than being in love that can increase oxytocin production and, conversely, oxytocin is not going to stay elevated every day for the life of a marriage no matter how much in love someone is. IOW, it can’t be measured.
I think your statement is true, as far as it goes, but it would also be true of any concept - if person A believed they like person B, then they do. Only person A can fill in the details of what he concept of ‘like’ means to them and whether person B fulfills them. 'Tis why we don’t all like each other.
All this to say that I’m not sure your question can be answered since everyone will see it through a different set of filters. I have been with my wife for about 35 years, married for 28. I know I love her, but couldn’t begin to tell you whether what anyone else is feeling is ‘love’.
Don’t people occasionally say things like, “I thought I was in love with him, but I was really in love with the idea of being in love,” or “I thought I loved her, but actually I loved my own idea of who she was, not the real her”?
Yes, they do, but that is evaluation after the fact.
If you had asked them ‘before’, they would have asserted that they were in love. It’s only after the love ends, and they are disillusioned with the way it came out, that they decide that it wasn’t real.
I’m not sure that really changes the answer, which is, that only the person who loves can determine if they love.
Your mother loves you, and you don’t love her. Not an unknown situation.
Or you may love her, and she doesn’t love you.
I love some of my friends. It’s not something I think about often, but I was brought face-to-face with it when I got married: it was interesting finding that I was marrying someone I loved, and I got to say “I love you”, and there were all these other people who I also loved, that I was /not/ going to get married to, to whom I did /not/ say “I love you”. — and there is no reason to believe that all my friendships are completely reciprocal.
Once you remove “infatuation”, romantic love is still just love. I love some people for the kind of people they are, for the things they do, for the things they’ve done. For the same reasons, they don’t have to like me at all.
