The Definition is Yours
Posted By Lonesome Loser on December 24, 2009
I just want to argue for taking all this discussion, and every “expert” opinion on unrequited love (as well as romantic love in general) with several grains of salt. Basically, deciding whether you are in love or not is your decision. There is no surefire way to verify “for real” whether it’s love or not. I believe that how we evaluate our feelings is basically a cognitive overlay on a fairly similar set of physiological and to a certain degree emotional processes (see “How Do You Know When You are in Love?” post). So that whether we label our experiences as crush, love, sexual desire, or whatever, depends on our current circumstances. In childhood and adolescence, the love-struck as well as people around them tend to define those feelings as a “crush.” In the early adulthood years of 20 to 30 or 35, these feelings tend to be experienced as “love,” then sometimes later re-evaluated and labeled a “crush” or a “mistake” in some way. In mid-to-late-adulthood, the feelings are such a surprise that they tend to be evaluated as “love” by the person.
I would also argue that the impact and call to action of romantic love changes over time. As children and adolescents, we’re simply overwhelmed by our feelings and believe we “like” the person, want to date them or spend time with them. In early adulthood, when we first tend to evaluate our feelings as “love,” the call to action is fairly clear — marry, mate, this is “the one,” this is a certainty. Then in later adulthood, we many of us have already married or are involved in longterm relationships, falling in love does not necessarily dictate a certain course of action. How we evaluate the impact of love at that point tends to depend on our life circumstances, personal value systems, and capacity for change. When people fall in love while in a committed relationship with another person, they may evaluate it as a call to change their lives, or as something to ignore for the sake of propriety or the children, or as some kind of falsehood or cruel joke of the universe.
Does this analysis make sense to you? That whether we are “in love” or not depends not so much on some inherently real yet unquantifiable essence, but rather mostly on the meaning we make of it — in that fundamental sense, we are the architects of our own loves.
‘Love is the difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”
For me love is when someone else’s emotions, someone else’s ideas, someone’s else’s beliefs, someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s physical, mental, and emotional state seem more defined, pronounced and important than your own.