Question How do you know when you are in love?

Accepted:
May 26, 2010

Comments

I suggest one of the ways is by monitoring when you feel happy or sad. When you are with someone (Skippy), do you feel happy? When Skippy is not around, do you feel sad? If so, this is one of the marks of love. Further reflection will then be in order: what is it about being with Skippy makes you happy? Maybe Skippy likes you and you like being liked. This would not be enough, I suggest, to indicate whether you actually love Skippy her or himself. When you get to the point of realizing that you are delighting in the sheer goodness and well being of Skippy and that when you are sad, you miss the presence of Skippy, then I think you have quite a bit of evidence that: you are in love.

As I've noted here before, we should surely distinguish loving someone from being in love with them. I might delight in the "sheer goodness and well being of" my daughter, miss her presence, especially when I'm feeling low -- that's evidence of love, but not of being in love.

It is only too easy to be in love with someone you don't really love in Charles's sense (which is why I don't think his reply will do as an answer to a question about being in love). You can be obsessed, lustful, unable to get the other person out of your mind, your heart leaps at their glance, you are wildly jealous of glances bestowed elsewhere, but for all that you don't really care for the other in the right way, or delight in their well-being etc. ("If you really loved her", we might have to say to the man in love, "you wouldn't treat her like that.")

Being in love, as Romeo memorably says, can be a "madness ... a choking gall and a preserving sweet". Proust is depressingly good on this!

Question How do you know when you are in love? Accepted:May 26, 2010

Question How do you know when you are in love?

Accepted:
May 26, 2010