How To Know if it’s Really True Love

This article is not giving tips on how to know if your boyfriend or girlfriend truly loves you. Rather, it focuses on you. This article challenges you to ask yourself this sincere question – ‘Is it true love I have for him/her?’ Many teenagers, (even some adults) cannot tell whether the feelings they have for the other person is real love or something else.

To help answer this bugging question, answer on a sheet of paper the following questions:

1. How would you define “love”?
2. How would you define “infatuation”?
3. How would you differentiate between both?

Answer this questions in your opinion. Don’t use the internet or the dictionary and don’t ask anyone.

Hypothetically, answering those questions is a piece of cake. But it is a different ball game entirely when you set your eyes on a boy or girl of your dreams. Suddenly, everything about them excites you and nothing else matters. You’re hopelessly in love or are you just in infatuation? How can you tell?

To know how, I would advice you admit these feelings. Denying them or pretending they don’t exist only makes it a surefire way to intensify them. Rather, use them to understand the three facets of romance – Attraction, Infatuation and Love. A good understanding of these, will help you examine your feelings properly.

• Attraction (what you see): He makes eye contact with you, smiles slightly at you and walks confidently. You are sure going to be attracted to that kind of person. While it is not bad to be attracted to an individual because of their beautiful and handsome appearance, the problem is what you see is not what you get. The saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover.
• Infatuation (what you feel): Infatuation feels like love but unlike love, it does not have a good basis for those feelings. The basis for this emotions may be because most of your friends talk about this one person always. It is blind to the weaknesses and excessive emphasis on the strengths of the other individual. If before your eyes the other person can do no wrong, then you are not in love. You are in infatuation. Infatuation is such that, you can be attracted to someone one day and in a month time, you feel the same way but towards someone else. Infatuation considers only the outer person. Once you find out the real person inside, you realize you are not compatible. Infatuation doesn’t last. It is like a sand castle. It is the most fragile kind of love.

• Love (What you know): Love is based on what you know, and not just what you see and feel. With love, you have a reasonable reason to be attracted to someone. Love, unlike infatuation, is based on a well-rounded knowledge of a person’s strength and weakness. If you are truly in love, you admit the weaknesses of each other and try to work on them. With love, you stop flirting with other people because love comes with loyalty.

Related Article: Understanding the Difference Between Lust, Love & Infatuation.

So, before you begin confessing love to the opposite sex, be sure if what you feel is actually love or just infatuation. Don’t begin a relationship because your friends are also interested in that same guy/girl. Understand the inner qualities of the individual. When you realize that you dwell more on the physical qualities of the other person, then it is infatuation. When it is true love, then you love in totality i.e both inner and outer qualities. Love does not dwell on the superficial.