How do you know if you are in love?

Most of us claim to have been “in love” at some point in our lives and many of us have also mistaken lust for love at some point or thought that we were in love when in fact our feelings were more of an infatuation. Many of us know what love is and choose not to question it because of a mutual strength experienced by the two partners, whilst others can remain a little uncertain. Whilst lust tends to be a strong, physical attraction, love tends to be a little bit more than that and even though feelings of lust spark up the same fumes as love it doesn’t necessarily mean you are actually “in love”.

In order to fall in love with someone of course you must find the person desirable and physically attractive in some way but love tends to have a habit of allowing us to see much more than that, it allows us to fall underneath the surface and take in the feelings and pressures of just about everything the other person is thinking or feeling, love then allows a relationship to grow into something that goes beyond lust and it can often seem that somewhere along the lines you have made a spiritual pact to support each other through a certain period of time.

Love is described as the emotion that keeps us on earth as it tends to hold everything together and ground us, if we experience a universal love for example and compassion for the people that surround our day to day lives we are more likely to succeed in life knowing that the love we think and feel provides us with the strength to survive, as we know we will receive it equally back in return. This very much applies to relationship love in the sense that the two of you work together and provide each other with the daily strength you both need but it tends to work more on a deep soul level where two people work with an inner identity that is mutually shared between them. Love is experienced in many different ways but being in love requires the person to let go of their insecurities and accept and trust that the other person will love them for who they are and care for them more than they care for themselves.

It is easy to mistake lust for love because lust provides us with the chance to lose ourselves in a dream like fantasy and because physical attraction can be so overpowering we allow ourselves to believe that it must be love. But what we tend to forget is the mistrust that often follows a lusty connection, as once the lust starts to wear off and love fails to replace it we begin to feel weak and sometimes angry that we have allowed ourselves to fall for such a trick. The early signs of lust are important to watch out for, some people experience their lust as an overpowering sense of commitment as well as being physically attracted whilst others may experience a slightly more detached feeling with an inner knowing or niggling thought that the situation is just purely lust.

Love tends to be an act of giving, the more you give the more you love and sometimes you give without even realising it! Quite often when love finally arrives at our doorsteps we find it was something we weren’t consciously searching for, a love perhaps that we’d never even imagined receiving. Usually the unexpected love will hold answers to some of our deepest most inner feelings and questions. Therefore we can’t help but go along with what feels natural.

Various philosophies suggest that love is rational and is based on intuition and positive emotions and lust is not but is more egoistical in the sense that it tends not to care about what the other person wants. It merely cares about selfish desire. Therefore the difference between love and lust is perhaps that love is fated and lust is something we sub consciously search for in order to prepare ourselves for the real thing.

In order to work out whether or not you have experienced a “lust” or “love” situation you can do so by taking note of your feelings before, during and after the first interaction. For example you may have experienced an absolute blissful encounter with someone that lasted for about five weeks but then felt a sudden pull in energy where the other person either became jealous of you or you became jealous of them. Perhaps you noticed changes in their behaviour or they noticed a change in yours and the chemistry fizzled out and became silence rather than continuous messages and exotic weekends.