How Do You Know If You Truly Love Someone

Love is a powerful and exhilarating feeling which at the same time can seem very complicated. It seems to be ever-elusive, yet always present feeling. These scenarios, together with several others, add up to make it difficult to know if you truly love someone.

The fact that love can take different forms is another issue. This kind of complicates one’s ability to tell if you’re truly in love with someone. The implication is that you might not be able to immediately decipher the type of loving you’re currently experiencing.

Again, scientists have found that love can be just as addictive as nicotine and cocaine.^[1] So, those exhilarating emotions you might be experiencing could be making things hard to clearly see through. Yet, love can creep in on you and develop from a place you least expect.

As a result, realizing the type of love you’re feeling and telling whether you’re truly in love with someone might not be that easy.

Thus, the aim of this article is to help you understand how to tell if you’re truly in love with someone or not. While the task might not be easy, it’s very possible to tell if you truly love someone.

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A Quick Note….

Before going any further, it’s pertinent to accept the fact that there are different types of love. This is very important as we move forward. The reason is because many people make the mistake of thinking that true love is only the passionate type. They feel that any other kind of love is untrue.

Most people simply want the kind of love that Diana Barrows describes in It Takes Two – “that can’t eat, can’t sleep, reach for the stars, over the fence, world series kind of love.”

Yet, the truth is that it’s actually the quiet and steady kind of love that stands the test of time. In fact, the partners in any happy and long-lasting love relationship have realized that love isn’t just about the dopamine rushes.

They understand that true love is about cherishing everything. And this includes the good and the bad, the middles and the lows.

Falling in Love and Loving Someone.

When it comes to how to know if you’re in love with someone, you need to realize something very important. This is the fact that there’s a big difference between “falling in love” with someone and “loving” someone.

For one, it’s a fact that we cannot continue to remain in that high place of “falling of love” all the time. The act of “falling in love” with someone is a chemical high that’s not supposed to last forever.

Unfortunately, this is what most people categorize as true love and therefore crave after. This longing for something so transient and elusive is perhaps the main reason many people go through so much pain all in the name of love.

When it comes to loving someone, this is a conscious decision you make. It is a decision of commitment to be together, to trust them, and to care for them. In loving someone, you realize that there are days that will be filled with lots of sunshine. You also acknowledge the fact that others might be cloudy, gray, or even stormy.

Thus, with true love, it’s definitely not all sunshine and rainbows like most social media, movies, and pop culture will have us believe.

Hence, there will be times when you’ll feel like your once-profound feelings of love have started dwindling. However, you’ve come to realize that this does not mean that you no longer love the person.

True Love and Emotional (Affective) Responsiveness.

True love is an emotional bond that deepens over time between two people. Partners who truly love each other have deliberately nurtured this bond through their “emotional responsiveness.” ^[1]

Emotional responsiveness is your ability to understand and respond appropriately to your partner’s feelings. This is especially important during such times when your partner may no longer feel safe sharing themselves with you. Yet, at times such feelings may have absolutely nothing to do with you.

No matter how love may make you feel, it will always remain a feeling. And like every other feeling, love is bound to ebb and flow depending on a variety of factors.

It’s how you respond to these changes that’ll determine if your love survives or not. Is your love worth fighting for? If yes, then keeping it alive is a decision that lies with you.

True Love is Different for Everyone.

Another thing that makes it pretty difficult to know if you are in love with someone is the fact that people don’t experience love in the same way.

Part of the reason is because an individual’s life experiences and relationship history has a vital part to play. Such experiences can alter what they understand to be the course of a “typical” romantic attraction.

The truth is that even the love experienced by some of the happiest and longest-lasting relationships differ in many ways. Just as people are different from one another, so is every wonderful love relationship a slightly different permutation of the love experience.

This is why you often hear people say that “love works in mysterious ways.” And to which I completely concur. It isn’t always as dramatic as most people paint it to be or want it to be. At times, love can start ever so quietly yet with a very powerful effect.

How To Know If You Truly Love Someone.

In fact, you need to realize that there’s no single way to categorically know if what you’re feeling is actually true love or if you’re just caught up in the throes of some serious infatuation.

So, how exactly do you know that you truly love someone since there are no specific labels or diagnostic signs to pin on it? What exactly does loving someone require and entail?

Luckily, you can figure out a lot if you pay close attention to how you feel and act around your special someone. By being attentive to your feelings, the way your body reacts, and your actions, you should be able to figure out if you’re really in love with them.

Given the above, here are a few important physical and emotional signs you can look out for to know if you’re truly in love with someone.

1. You Miss Their Presence.

I guess this is the most obvious of all. This is because when you love someone, it’s natural to want to spend a lot of time with them. You start valuing the time spent with them over a lot of other things in your life. This often reflects how interdependent your lives have become.

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Inf act, you don’t care about what you do when you’re together with each other. All you desire is to be simply together with them. And this is often irrespective of the mood or energy levels of either of you.

Also, how much you miss your special someone often goes to show how committed you are to the relationship. However, this does not have to be an obsessive feeling.

For instance, you can get into the habit of thinking about what their opinion would be when reading a book, watching a good movie, or trying on some new clothes. It’s also okay to intermittently call or text them just to hear their voice and find out how they’re doing.

When you’re in a truly healthy love relationship, you should be able to spend time apart from your special someone. It should never be a situation where you’re obsessing over what they’re doing every other minute. If it becomes too obsessive, you might simply be infatuating about them.

True love doesn’t usurp nor disrupts your life; rather it fits into your real life without becoming unnecessarily overwhelming.

2. You Trust and Feel Safe With Them.

Trust is a very important aspect of developing a long-term loving relationship. Thus, one good sign to know that you truly love someone is your ability to fully trust them.

When you see your special someone, your simply can’t help but notice how your tension relaxes around them. This often implies that you’ve come to take them for their word. It also shows that you feel safe enough with them to share your personal weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

3. You Get a Bit Jealous.

In healthy relationships, a certain amount of jealousy is actually allowed, and is not necessarily toxic. Jealousy is like any other emotion you feel, what’s important is how you manage it.

Naturally, jealousy is an adaptation in relationships. It’s a feeling that actually helps the partners to be sensitive to potential threats to their love. Such could be the situation with an attractive coworker who your partner often makes reference to. It could also be the feeling over an ex-lover that they unavoidably still interact with.

Engaging in suspicious jealousy like secretly checking your partner’s cellphone are not made out of love. Such actions are rather indications of chronic insecurity, low self-esteem, and relational anxiety.

But people who exhibit reactive or emotional jealousy tend to be more committed to their relationships. Such jealousy is usually predicted by positive relationship factors like trust and dependency. Then again, most feelings of jealousy tend to fade away as greater trust develops between the partners.

4. You Seek Their Happiness.

Love isn’t just about being loved, it’s also about giving it to others. In fact, truly loving someone isn’t about what you get in return as just loving them is enough for you. Your focus is rather about sharing experiences and building a life together.

This is why when you truly love someone, your behaviors and feelings are normally focused on understanding and supporting them. You make them a priority in your life and want to make them happy without expecting anything in return. This is generally the case whenever they seem to be going through difficult situations.

So, loving someone isn’t just about the feelings you have towards them. It also has a lot to do with the things you for your special someone. This is one of the best ways to tell if you’re truly in love with someone.

5. They Make You Want to Be a Better Person.

When you fall in love, there is a significant change in your whole sense of self. It’s usually the case that everything around you seem more exciting.

This tends to affect the things you think about, your general habits, and how you spend your time. Most times, you unconsciously want to take on the traits and characteristics of your special someone.

In fact, several research studies have shown that falling in love is associated with self-expansion. This means that you tend to grow as a person. You are also more willing to get out of your comfort zone and try new things.

Thus, when you’re truly in love with someone, there’s often a compulsion to want to care more, read more, and know more in order to make yourself a more well-rounded individual.

This isn’t about trying to impress your special someone by pretending to like what they like. It rather has more to do with how they effortlessly motivate you to want to take your life to the next level and be the best version of you.

Thus, you’d know you’re are in love with someone if they motivate you to deliberately want to start addressing your personal flaws and developing a better character.

When all is said and done, love is about working together to improve your relationship by being better individuals.

6. You See a Future Together With Them.

When you’re truly in love with someone, you naturally want to spend time with them. Thus, it makes a lot of sense when you find yourself shifting your focus from the present to thinking long-term about both of you.

Developing true love for someone makes it quite difficult picturing your future without them in it. You naturally tend to make them a top priority in situations such as choosing a new career, choice of a new residence, making vacations plans, or even setting new future goals.

Try and close your eyes and imagine being together with this person in your future. What kind of feelings does this evoke within you? Can you assess how your body reacts?

Do you feel expansion and warmth with a sense that you have a compelling future with them? If you feel otherwise, your body might be telling you something you need to pay attention to.

In Conclusion….

Falling in love with someone is a wonderful feeling that everyone wants to experience. In fact, we all go through it at one stage or another in our lives in the process of building a healthy and long-lasting love relationship.

Staying together in a relationship requires more than satisfaction and feeling good in your special someone’s presence. Also, developing a long-lasting love relationship requires mutual investment and commitment.

It’s important to always remember that there are different kinds love. Thus, there’s no single way to know exactly what you’re feeling.

The key to knowing if you’re truly in love with someone lies in your ability to pay attention to how you feel and act around your love interest. Also, noticing the way your body reacts on the whole can help you figure out if you’re truly in love and have found the real deal.