Love and love: how to distinguish these feelings from each other?

Love in all its manifestations, and especially romantic love, is always elevated to the rank of a higher feeling. She is everywhere: books are written about her, films and TV shows are made, pictures are drawn.

But reality and works of art are different things. A person who feels strongly attracted to another person may experience dismay, and inner feelings can be contradictory.

Is he experiencing love? And how to distinguish love from love, affection and other feelings? To understand it, it is important to analyze your own feelings and match them with information about love and falling in love.

What is love?

Love - a feeling of very strong sympathy that a person feels, a feeling of spiritual unity with someone.

She is one of the preeminent themes in all areas of art, she is extolled, eager to find and extremely idealized.

Robert Sternberg derived a three-component theory of true love, which ideally reveals the essence of this feeling:

Frankness, intimacy, sincerity. This item includes the assurance that the partner can be trusted with almost anything without fear of getting negative, and the desire to do it; the feeling of calmness, confidence in the future, appearing due to the presence of this person in life; the desire to be the same trust person for a loved one; the desire to better understand his feelings and help in everything.
Passion. This desire to be in intimate intimacy with a partner and receive deep physical pleasure from these moments. Also, a person who really loves will find his partner attractive. Passion is an element that looks like falling in love, but for people who have been together for a long time, it is not as pronounced as in the first stages of communication, and this is completely normal: the body does not maintain a high level of love hormones over the years.
Commitments. This is loyalty, the desire to be with this person for many years, the desire to support him, to look for reasonable ways out of conflict situations, to prevent rupture of relations, and much more.

It is unreasonable to consider love as something of a magic wand, after finding which life turns into a wonderful fairy tale.

True love - This is a big job that needs to be done for decades. But, of course, this work brings generous results and makes life ten times better.

Many young people who grew up on fairy tales about love have little familiarity with the concept of “responsibility”, often confuse love and love, seek to break off relationships as soon as “passion has weakened” because they are convinced that passion is true love. should always be as hot as the first month of a relationship.

But these are extremely erroneous judgments, the occurrence of which is closely related to the problem that exists in society: love is overly idealized.

What is this job to do? Here are just a small part of what needs to be done in order to experience a deep spiritual unity with a partner for many years:

To find compromises. In the process of living together, a couple will inevitably fall from time to time into situations requiring discussion and the search for compromises that will help preserve peace.
Take into account the feelings and desires of the partner. People are different, and all have pain points. If a partner says that, for example, it is unpleasant for him to listen to unsolicited advice and criticism about his drawings, it is important to listen to this.
Control emotions. Any, even a miserable conflict can lead to fatal consequences if one of the partners does not survive and explodes, throwing out a ton of insults and accusations.
Analyze. The ability to sit down and think about what happened, put everything on the shelves, put yourself in the place of a partner and will allow you to better understand certain situations and make the right decision.
Take a partner. All people have positive and negative sides, and the latter may not like their partners. Some of them are constantly trying to remake a person for themselves, so that he meets all the "quality standards".
Yes, it is possible to point out an unpleasant character trait, but attempts to break a person’s personality, to deprive him of the right to decide for himself how to behave in certain situations, what to love and what to hate is not the best solution.
It is also important to be ready for changes associated with diseases, old age, lifestyle changes that can occur with a partner, and accept them, and not push him away just because he has become not comfortable enough and attractive.

Sympathy or true love? Learn from the video:

Signs of

The main signs of love:

Awareness. A person realizes that much in a relationship depends on him, and understands that he needs to take responsibility for many things, be ready to support, look for compromises, see both advantages and disadvantages.
Time. Conscious love can last for decades, unlike love, which in most cases lasts no more than two or three years.
Reliability. Love is not something airy, ephemeral. On the contrary: this is the foundation on which the joint life of the couple is built, and only depends on them how strong it will be.
Reciprocity. Romantic love is a feeling that must be shared, otherwise it remains in the framework of love.
Passion does not come first. Sex, which brings pleasure to both partners, is good, it is an important component of relationships (except for cases where asexual people are in union), but if it is in the first place in importance and the rest is mutual aid, awareness, the need to take Responsibility - perceived as something secondary, not too important, you can hardly talk about love.
Confidencethat the person who is nearby is exactly what is needed, that it's only worth living with him for several decades and to meet old age.
Love as if lays out the object of passion into components, and a man in love, if you ask him, will certainly list what he loves his partner for: beautiful eyes, ability to paint, mind, for example. At the same time, negative sides are hardly perceived. In the case of love the person perceives both the positive and negative sides of his partnerHe even accepts that which is not to his liking, and realizes that he loves everything, without different “buts”. Not eyes, hands, mind, kindness, but the partner itself.

Love and affection - what are the differences? How to understand what keeps you staying with a person? Comment in this video:

Love concept

Being in love is a strong feeling of sympathy, which is based on hormonal activity, which is not stable.

Over time, it either dries out or transforms into love, depending on the desires of people in love with each other. She is not limited to sexual desire only, although it is certainly one of the pillars of this feeling.

Also during love due to the action of hormones, a person is not always able to logically comprehend the identity of his chosen one.

Even if he realizes that he has some negative sides, he does not take them seriously and exalts the positive. These are the so-called “rose-colored glasses”, which “subside” when love falls off.

The more rational and intelligent a person is, the harder it is to fool him completely into the feeling of love.

Lightweight, romantic people who are accustomed to rely on feelings and not on the mind, on the contrary, much easier to turn the head.

Hormonesaffecting the emergence and preservation of feelings of love:

dopamine;
serotonin;
adrenalin;
endorphins;
vasopressin;
oxytocin.

But falling in love is not just hormones. It is unreasonable to believe that people — beings far advanced in development — move only substances produced by the body.

The emergence of feelings of love is influenced by a lot of factors, including social ones, which are difficult to fully take into account.

Main features

Signs of love:

Specific changes in physical well-being. This famous “throwing into heat, shivering” at the sight of an object of passion, accompanied by severe euphoria, during which the heartbeat quickens, sweat is more actively released. During the peak of love passion, sleep disturbances can occur (insomnia, frequent waking up), because the brain is overloaded at this time. Also often disappears appetite.
Creating a personality cult object of love. Since the disadvantages are not noticed or are not taken seriously, and the advantages, on the contrary, look incredibly significant, it is easy to begin to experience the strongest admiration. "He is a unique, special, absolutely amazing person!" - say lovers of people about his chosen one. In some cases, this admiration goes beyond all boundaries and is more like fanaticism.
The desire to become better for the chosen one. A person who has little interest in his own appearance can begin to take care of himself, buy new things, learn to use cosmetics. Also, while in love, people listen to every statement of the one they are in love with. If he says that he loves origami, reads Schopenhauer and finds redheads attractive, it is possible that a person in love with him will run to learn to fold cranes, look for Schopenhauer’s volume in the library and dye his hair.
The desire to be close. Each meeting with the chosen one becomes almost a holiday, especially if they are infrequent. A man in love will seek to abandon all cases, only to have time for a date.

There are other signs of love, such as the desire to care, the fear of losing the chosen one, patience with respect to any of his antics, even the most inadequate.

Love or love? How to distinguish? Watch the video:

Similarities of two concepts

The main similarities of these feelings:

the presence of strong sympathy for man, attraction;
fear of parting with the chosen one;
fear that something might happen to him;
desire to help, support;
the desire to be a confidential person for the chosen one.

Love and love have a lot in commonbecause they have a common basis and common goals, but it depends only on a couple how long the feelings will last and what they will bring with them.

Difference from other similar feelings

The difference between love and:

Passion. This is one of the main components of both love and love. This is a combination of emotional and sexual attraction to a partner, which does not include responsibility, acceptance and many other components of true love.
Affections This feeling is almost always present in love relationships, complements and strengthens them.
But in some cases, affection can be observed in the absence of love. It is she who sometimes does not give the couple, in which for a long time there are no feelings, mutual respect and warmth, to part.
If two people become attached to each other, their relationships — often toxic — become a comfort zone for them, which is extremely difficult to leave. Relationships based on affection and deprived of love, always hurt, uncomfortable, and this is the main difference.
Habits When two people are in union for a long time, minor troubles and life gradually destroy feelings, but the habit remains. A person gets used to another person and to what is connected with him. Every day my wife gets used to cooking her favorite scrambled eggs for breakfast for her husband, gets used to everyday life, gets used to petty quarrels, and the idea of parting sometimes doesn't even occur. Getting out of relationships also means getting out of your comfort zone. In this regard, the habit is similar to affection, but usually does not cause such strong discomfort.
Sympathies. It is an essential element of both love and love, but it may also not include other components of love. A feeling of sympathy that does not include passion, responsibility, affection, intimacy is not love.
Dependencies It is possible to talk about dependence in cases where the chosen one for a person becomes the center of the universe, and the desire to become practically one with it prevails. Only it matters, and many other aspects of life — career growth, hobbies, learning, friendship, dreams — are discounted. True love does not pull a person out of other areas of life, they exist together and complement each other. Sensations similar to addiction can be observed while falling in love, but after that they subside.

Like and love - what's the difference? Find out about this from the video:

Attraction and true love - what's the difference?

Sex drive it takes place to be in the period of love, but if it is in the foreground, and other aspects of the feeling - the desire to cherish, support, the desire to become better, the fear of losing - are absent or expressed very weakly, it is an attraction, not love.

But if people who are in love with each other have a very strong libido, the boundaries between attraction and love are partially blurred.

True love not selfish, and to maintain it you need to work: to be attentive to the partner, to take some responsibility, to see the negative sides of the partner, to be able to resolve conflicts, to realize that love is not a holiday for life, but a much more complex quintessence of feelings, emotions, situations.

While in love, some sides of love can also be observed, but they are not expressed too strongly. Love is more fanatical, and love is a conscious, mature feeling that can last a lifetime.

Love or passion? How to determine? Comparison:

How to protect yourself from mistakes?

To better understand your own feelings, it is important to analyze them, think about it, ask yourself questions such as “Do I really want to live life with this person?”, “Am I ready to accept him or her?”, try to track down the negative sides of the elect, write them down and try to imagine that they belong to someone else.

Is it difficult to tolerate such a person? Would you like to do business with him?

At the initial stage of falling in love (in the first few months), the color of rose-colored glasses is most saturated, so it will be difficult to protect yourself from mistakes due to the fact that hormones make the brain perceive the chosen one extremely positively, even if he behaves disgustingly.

An ideal algorithm, which is guaranteed not to make a mistake in feelings, in principle does not exist, since life is unpredictable, and even a person who behaves in an exemplary manner may turn out to be completely different at any moment.

Romantic interaction - the path of trial and error, and it is worth being aware of.

The most important thing - time to noticethat the relationship began to bring pain, not pleasure, warmth and tranquility, and abandon them as soon as possible.