How to Know If Like Is Love

Can you tell if they are in like or in love? What does your gut say?

As if I, or anyone, could answer this.

You need more confirmation than you do new revelations, and I understand, because I wish I had me writing how tos to look at when I was going through some of my relationships.

Is this relationship like? Is it love? Will it last? Does he love me? Does she love me? Is it time to meet dad? Get married? Or just have a good time for now? ...Or let it go?

Read on...

Instructions

1. 

   Note your feelings about your romantic partner when they are not there.

   You can be in like or simply infatuated with someone and miss them terribly. Also, you can be in love with someone for a very short period of time. The good thing is, the gut and the heart are pretty good at discerning love that will last from that which won't.

   If you find yourself imagining yourself in old age with your guy/girlfriend more than what you guys are doing next week, it might be love. If you find yourself having to try, it's probably just like, that will fade.

2. 

   Note your feelings about your partner's weaknesses when (s)he is there.

   Do you now know every bad nook and cranny of your partner, and not care? I don't mean true dealbreakers like chronically unemployed or eternal crybaby, but all the stuff that turned you off to everyone else, but all of a sudden you don't care about? Might be love.

3. 

   The next step, now that we've got this person squarely in your fantasy life, and you don't mind them in your current one, is would you uproot your current life for this person?

   Would you move? Find a new job? Leave friends? Family? Marriages are supposed to break old bonds, in a way. Are you comfortable taking that risk with this person and not looking back? If so, might be love.

4. 

   The final test to determine like from love are the vows you take at marriage. As much as I personally believe marriage itself as little more than a legally sanctioned business arrangement, the ceremony, and the vows taken during it, are not so pointless.

   "In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, till death do us part."

   Many people these days are forgetting what these words really mean. It means commitment, which means even if that musky animal love you're feeling now should subside into something more even tempered, you would remain committed to the vows you made to this person, and they to you.

   If you can say this, trulymadlydeeply, it might be love.