Whats your opinion on how you know/knew you were in love?
This is just something in general to Gage and see what the different thoughts are that are out there.
Whats your opinion on how you know/knew you were in love?
This is just something in general to Gage and see what the different thoughts are that are out there.
I was having a discussion about love with a friend, she was trying to figgure out if what she felt for her girl truly was love. We were getting into a bit about devotion and the feeling one gets, as if your right arm has been ripped from you when the object of the emotions leaves your presence. Was that a sign of love? Yes, she said she’d though so. Sounded entirely reasonable to me. Funny thing, as the convo, was suppose to be for her benifit yet, I got more out of it than she.
At the time, my ExHub and myself were only dating and although he said an many occasions previously that he’d loved me, I had yet to return it. Latter when I trie explaining this to him, he asked if I did love him. I didn’t admit it to him untill probly a week latter.
When all you can do is think about is the other person … constantly
I first realized that I loved him when, in mid-October, he waded out butt-deep in the Gulf of Mexico fully-clothed. He’s crazy and fun and caring and totally unconcerned with what other people think. And I knew.
[when harry met sally] The way you know about a good melon. [/when harry met sally]
DeVena
married 9 years 2 days
Not really the FIRST time I knew I loved him but this happened recently to really make me think.
We had a huge arguement to the point where we talked about getting a divorce. I mean dividing up the furniture, tellings the kids, etc. Yuckiness.
I was thinking about that concept and it hit me all of a sudden that THIS is who I want to be with when I am 60 years old. This is the man I want to grow old with and this is the person who is my best friend. I don’t want to not be with him…ever.
Love doesn’t keep a marriage together…committment does.
And I decided then and there that it is worth it to me to work through all those fights and the bad stuff because it only makes us stronger and we can have all that great hot monkey make-up sex.
When I realized that I wanted him to be happy no matter what. We weren’t always a couple. We were kind of on agaia nd off again and he was seeing someone else…and I realized I was really in loe with him myself when I painfully realized it was more important to let him be happy with her than to break them apart.
Then when they did break up and one evening I watched him sleep and imagined him as a very very old man, where all the lines would go in his face and what he might look like if all his muscles were gone and soft and if his hair were white or were to fall out and I wanted to be beside the image I imagined and I imagined being old and infirm and loving him all the more as a white haired little old lady. That’s when I knew I really loved him.
Oy, I wrote a thing about it, just a couple of months ago.
What is Love
Knowing a person in all aspects and having no reservations about spending the rest of your life with that person is love.
Infatuation is the same, but without knowing a person or knowing him/her only on the surface.
Knowing a person, and liking only some things (even if it’s most of the things) about him/her is not love, and not even infatuation. And it’s complete foolishness to get into a relationship with that person and hope that the bad things that you dislike about him/her will go away.
Of course, you can object, “But we can work things out!”
You don’t work intimate relationships out. They either work or they don’t, from the very beginning. Even though being in a healthy relationship should inspire work to become a better individual, it does not require work – not “working out” the relationship itself, not "working on yourself’ to fit in with your partner, and not working on your partner to make him/her fit in to your expectations of the ideal of a soulmate. Simply because you do not get more compatible with a person you fully know.
By the same token, statements like “we just don’t love each other anymore” mean that there was never love in the first place. It did not wither or die because the members of the couple weren’t “doing those loving things.” The feeling was simply never there. And the amount of people who keep gripping at straws in failing relationships instead of going out and finding that one person who is the ying to their yang (and vice versa) is amazing, and it disgusts me. There is nothing blocking your happiness, people, but yourselves.
You’ll say, “But if you truly believe that, you are risking to miss a lot in your life. It requires work to become virtuous in something and to experience satisfaction and bliss. Love doesn’t make an exception.”
What am I risking to miss exactly? Dead end relationships with people who don’t love me? I’m more than happy to miss that, and recommend that you follow my example.
That old statement “love is not a noun but a verb” is mindbogglingly asinine, because it implies that love is not something you feel, but something you do.
It smacks of the whole (unhealthy) viewpoint of “do nice things to me and I will love you – I will do nice things to you, and you will love me.” It is inherently manipulative, includes one-sided relationships, and it does not ever work with intimate relationships, because to nurture love, love has to be there in the first place. True love means you genuinely want to be with a person. It has nothing to do with the things you are willing to do for him/her (and conversely the things he/she does for you).
If you need incentives to be with someone, it’s not love.
mipiace, mine was kind of the same - I was drifting just before falling asleep one night when Jim and I had started dating, and I had sort of a dream about Jim being dead and lying in his coffin and me sitting in the first row of pews, mourning him as an old lady, and I woke up with a start and could hardly breathe from how emotional I was from that dream. That clinched it for me.
Aries, that is so right. Love brings you together, but it is the decisions you make every day that keep you together. Should I call him a name during an argument, or not say it because I know it will hurt him? Should I make the first move after an argument, or just let the hurting fester? Should I start an argument over nothing because I’m in a bad mood, or should I just go eat some chocolate and get over myself?
!cequeen, I obviously disagree with you. I believe love is a sliding scale, not a toggle; some days I love more than others, and I’m sure it’s the same for Jim. I also think there are many people that are compatible enough to have a happy life together, not just one special person for everyone.
You start out in love with your spouse, but if you don’t act lovingly, your actions will chip away at what was good at first. If you act lovingly, you will build on what is already there. In my opinion, of course.
[quote]
I also think there are many people that are compatible enough to have a happy life together, not just one special person for everyone.
[quote]
I never said that there’s just one.
I either love. Or I don’t. I don’t love more or less. I am compatible more or less. When I am compatible to the degree that I love everything about a person, it’s love. It doesn’t diminish or increase. It’s just there.
I knew that I loved her the day that we woke up next to each other and I realized that I could do that- I could wake up next to her for as far in the future as I could see and be happy. That she could keep me still.
We broke up a year ago, but I can’t say that I regret any of it except the very end.