Are You in Love? – The Difference Between Infatuation and True Love
One of the first things that you learn in meditation is to let go of love. Love is a spectrum of various strong and profound emotional and spiritual states, from the highest sublime ideal, the highest human conscience, to the easiest, most natural pleasure. There is always some level of variation between the levels of love. While some levels of love are most appropriate and beneficial, other levels are inappropriate, or at best, inappropriate for our purposes. This article explores these various levels and offers insight into what is appropriate for each state of love.
Love is often considered the best emotion, or even the only emotion, that matters in the scheme of things. In my experience love is always the result of appropriate emotions coming from feelings and thoughts. Love is not just an emotion; it’s a process that includes caring, sharing, patience, giving, acceptance, forgiveness, tolerance, commitment, and support as well as feelings and thoughts. If we can drop all of those layers of emotion, caring, sharing, patience, giving, and tolerance, we will be much closer to expressing love fully. In fact, unconditional love may be the only way to truly love because there is no pressure to behave, no consequences, no comparison, no judgment, no need for reciprocation, and no need for intimacy. A more powerful love, based on unconditional love, may actually become the basis for all forms of love because it literally becomes a source of deep healing, comfort, and strength for those who experience it.
You may be wondering how you feel when you are loved, and if these things make you feel the happiest and most fulfilled. Love makes you feel nourished and supported by a source that is unselfish in its intentions and actions. When you ask yourself, “how do I feel when my partner,” or “my partner and I get along,” you may find that it is different for each person, but ultimately similar. Sometimes, you will find that you are able to live more openly and freely with your partner and express the depth and fullness of your love in ways that you never were before. If those same things make you feel the happiest and fulfilled, they may be your primary love language.
What do you feel when you are in love? It is often called the love language of dreams, romance, or attachment, because it represents the ideal of relating to another person romantically and deeply. One way you might describe this to someone who has never experienced it is, “feeling sexy with you.” This is one of the primary ways people learn the Romantic Love Language (RML), but if you have never experienced the joy of being loved romantically, you may not understand what it feels like.
Romantic love involves strong emotions like passion, attraction, desire, trust, adoration, devotion, friendship, respect, honesty, intimacy, and romance. When we are in love, our emotions can actually manifest physically in ways that you have probably never experienced. For example, one day you might find yourself holding hands with your husband as he walks out the door in the morning. Or you could catch a glimpse of your boyfriend as he jumps in the car with you after work. Strong feelings of affection like these are expressions of intimacy, and there are more.
Whether or not you label it as love, Infatuation is one of the strongest feelings experienced by humans, and it shows up in many different ways. For the purposes of this discussion, we will stick to descriptions of lust. While there are many different forms and levels of infatuation, most definitions of lust exclude the idea of strong feelings of affection. In many different ways, they show up side by side, but they are completely different!