How to Tell If You Are Really in Love
Loretta Young once said that love isn't something you find; it's something that finds you. Maybe it recently found you, or maybe you only suspect it did. You met someone, things moved fast, and now you're asking yourself whether this is the real thing or a convincing imitation of it.
If you've been seeing someone for a few weeks or a few months and still can't answer that question with any certainty, you're not alone. The early stage of dating floods you with feeling, and feeling is easy to mistake for love. Give it enough time and the shine often wears off. What's left is the actual person standing in front of you, and sometimes you realize the two of you have very little holding you together.
Admit the obvious first: most of us want to be in love. Wanting it isn't the problem. The trouble starts when the wanting gets ahead of the truth, so that what you're actually experiencing is closer to liking someone, or wanting them physically, than loving them. When the desire runs hot enough, it can steer you straight into the arms of the wrong person. That's how people end up stuck in relationships that go nowhere, convinced they'd found love when they hadn't. A few questions can help you sort out which one you're in.
Start with your body. Real love comes with chemistry you can feel. Endorphins spike, you get that buzzing, energized, slightly high sensation, and hormones reorganize your attention around one person. People in this state tend to tune out almost everything else. Friends get less of you. Family gets less of you. Your work slips, or your grades do. The people closest to you may notice you've changed and say something about it, and you'll barely register the complaint, because you're somewhere else entirely.
Then there's the way the world looks. Love has a habit of sharpening the ordinary. Colors seem to pop, leaves look greener, the apple in your hand looks redder than any apple has a right to. You walk around feeling generous toward strangers, convinced life is basically good, and very little manages to knock you off that high.
Common ground matters too, though not as the whole story. Plenty of couples thrive without matching on everything, and no two people ever line up completely. Still, it helps to actually like some of the same things when you're committing to someone. Think about what you genuinely know about your partner. Do your tastes in movies, music, or humor overlap at all? Do you enjoy any of the same activities? Do your values and beliefs sit anywhere near each other? Take an honest inventory.
Pay attention to touch. When you're in love, you want your hands on the other person: easy kisses, long hugs, the physical closeness that comes from being drawn to someone in body and mind. Couples in this stage can be a little much for their friends, forever cuddling and leaning into each other. The affection is a way of saying what you feel. If the idea of reaching for your partner leaves you cold, that absence tells you something.
Finally, notice how much you want to be around them. Can you even remember the last time you saw this person? If the answer is fuzzy, that's a sign. If instead you're counting the hours until you're together again, that's a different sign entirely. Love tends to want every waking and sleeping minute, more of the other person than seems reasonable. When you keep choosing friends or coworkers over them, when there's somehow never time, the feeling probably isn't what you hoped it was.