After having multiple conversations with various humans over the years, I have gathered that people are divided on a seemingly arbitrary issue: the difference between being "in love" and loving someone. Is this an arbitrary issue though? What do they mean? Is there a difference? When can I say that I'm truly in love with someone rather than just saying "I love you"?
These are all common questions that arise when the topic comes up, and I want to give my take on the issue, which I believe makes a lot of sense intuitively.
It seems to me that a great many people view being "in love" as the greatest possible good a couple can achieve in a relationship. Their goal is to be in love, and then to stay in love. Both parties desire a relationship where they are madly infatuated with everything about one another - the way she tucks that tuft of hair behind her ear, the way his words drip off his tongue like honey, the way she gently tugs her bottom lip when she wants you to come closer, etc.
Oftentimes, all that matters in relationship is how happy the other person makes you feel, and if that other person infringes on your happiness, you fall out of love and typically end the relationship. Additionally, a great many people believe (mostly single people) that this feeling of "being in love" can legitimately last for the entirety of the relationship, and that if you don't have this constant feeling of happiness and satisfaction with your partner, then they aren't right for you.
This is a lie. This approach to relationships is detrimental. It creates individuals that have unrealistic expectations concerning being "in love" and what that looks like. When in actuality, relationships are quite the contrary to this popular opinion, and "true love" is NOT the same as being "in love." The difference is stark.
This feeling of being "in love" is just that - a feeling. It is an emotional connection, infatuation, lust - whatever - that one feels for another. It is not a bad thing to feel these ways, and these feelings are actually useful; but to make that feeling your end goal, while also trying to use that same feeling as a means to achieve the end, is unattainable and unsatisfactory.
Emotions are fleeting - here one day, and gone the next. Is that how one would want describe their lover? "Oh I was so happily in love yesterday on our date, but not so much today when we are fighting. I just don't know if this relationship is right for me.." If being "in love" is all we have in relationships, then relationships would suck (and for some people, that's why they suck). But being in love does serve a purpose! Being emotionally in love can often spur on the action of love, and in that sense it is not a relationship crutch, but a tool to lead two people to deeper connection.
For instance, does a couple that has been married for 30 years has 3 kids, plenty of debt, and hardly any time for romance simply stop loving each other simply because they never have any euphoric feelings of romantic love? No. They have a strand of love running so deep that they are consciously aware of the environmental factors suppressing their relationship, and so they purposefully carve out time in order to work on their relationship, fostering new feelings of being in love.
LOVE, therefore, must be something different. LOVING someone doesn't just disappear after a few weeks like the feeling of being in love; although if our definitions of these two concepts are twisted, then one very well may think that their LOVE for another has disappeared.
Loving someone is a conscious commitment to sacrificially and unconditionally be there for another person. LOVE is a COMMITMENT. If love is a commitment, you can never blame environmental factors for your breakup, or say "I just don't feel it anymore," or say "I just wasn't happy anymore," or say "We just aren't as happy as we used to be." These are all break-up justifications pulling from the feeling of being in love, NOT the actual commitment of loving someone. These excuses are not sufficient to condone break-ups because they are based on a fickle understanding of what it means to even be in a relationship in the first place!
If LOVE is a commitment, then if you break-up with your partner, it is not their fault, or the situations fault (there are exceptions), but it's your own decision to sever your commitment to your partner.
Just because love is a commitment, does not denote the feelings associated with being in love. Being in love is important and fun, and spontaneous, and mentally and physically satisfying; so how are couples supposed to continuously cultivate that feeling?
True LOVE begets the feeling of being in love. LOVE is necessarily creative, and it creates (out of a commitment to another) situations and seasons of life in which we would call "being in love" all over again. Thus, it would seem that being "in love" leads to taking a step of commitment to LOVE the other person. And then in return, LOVE serves to seek out a time in which feeling of being "in love" can return. Even on a conceptual level it would appear that these two ideas are simultaneously in love and loving one another, representing what their purpose is in the very hearts and minds of humans. It is a beautiful display.
The concepts of LOVE and being "in love" are inextricably bound yet undeniably separate. It would seem to converge the two upon one another, or to disrespect the former in favor of the latter, is a great injustice done to the beauty and complexity of love.
