Differences between love and love state
When I was younger, about ten years ago, I read the book The Cheetah by Giuseppe Tomasi diLampedusa. In this novel, a sentence had challenged me, I had pointed it out without really understanding it. “She was in love with him but she didn’t love him.” How could one love without being in love? The difference seemed to me to be tiny or non-existent. But that phrase remained ingrained in my memory until I really understood it.
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Love or be in love? That is the question
Yes, you can love without being in love. And yes, you can be in love without loving. Besides, it is often either one or the other!
I see it a lot around me, via my relatives but also with the people I have in coaching: The non-distinction between love and the state of love is at the origin of many ailments in the couple, even, separations and divorces.
The media, books, romantic comedies clearly do not help. They almost all unanimously show a mistaken vision of love. Indeed, every time we read or watch a film about love, we finally find ourselves facing two people in a state of love and not in true love.
But then what is the difference between the two?
The differences between love and the state of love
I like Ghislaine Meyer’s way (I will put her video on the subject at the end), to differentiate the two through verbs: To be in love is to feel, to love is to decide.
1/ The state of love
All beautiful all pink …
To be in love is to feel, it is to be in emotion. The state of love, you will have understood, is therefore the state in which we find ourselves immersed especially at the beginning of the relationship: heart that beats hard as soon as we see the person, sweaty hands, immense desire, attraction, butterflies in the belly, heart rate that accelerates … So many signals that tell us that we are in love with a person.
In my article that explains the stages of a couple, I speak in the first place of “passion”, which you can easily replace with “state of love”. Indeed, we often evoke the passion of the beginnings, this period of euphoria where everything seems rosy, where there is not the slightest shadow on the picture. These beginnings where we promise ourselves mountains and wonders: we will love each other for life, we never know the routine .
If you are interested in the subject, I strongly invite you to read my article “What is love passion?” in which I take up myths and Stendhal’s book Of Love.
Thus, being in love is first of all an emotion that invades us. We say “fall in love”,because it happens like that, we do not choose to be in love, we are. This condition is extremely pleasant, it gives wings and makes it light but… like any state, it cannot last forever.
Up to the opposition phase (Differences between love and love state)
After the butterflies in the belly and the cloudless sky, things will become more complex. The flaws of your partner will begin to become visible to your eyes, you will start to tell yourself it was better before, what happened I did not see anything coming… Welcome to the couple’s opposition phase!
It is often during this phase that the couple will flap, one of the partners, if not both, will begin to doubt his choice, to think that he does not really like the other anymore, that this couple so perfect is finally doomed to failure. While PRECISELY, it is thanks to this step that we will be able to fully Love! Love the whole other and not the fake being that we have idealized!
2/ Love
To love is to decide.
Unlike the love passion of the beginnings, we are no longer in search of fusional love. We really want to know the other, in its entirety, with its flaws. We want to love, really love.
The brain, the reason, will take over from the heart. Christiane Singer said “The couple is the great chance of work”. Because yes, although we dreamed the opposite, although we would have liked love to come from oneself; LOVING IS A JOB. And not the easiest!
We are no longer in idealization, we discover the other and our couple in a new light and it is then that we will be able to make it solid or almost, indestructible. (Differences between love and love state)
Some stop relationships every two years, as soon as the opposition phase occurs, they prefer to go elsewhere or look for another partner to start all over again and find this euphoria so pleasant in the heart.
Others decide to get to work and love. They will show responsibility and will to infuse the couple with what they lack. It will then be necessary to make efforts, find a balance, learn to manage disputes and divergent opinions, communicate, fight boredom in order to be truly happy in his couple.
(Differences between love and love state)
Emotionally dependent people are the ones who have the most difficulty in moving from the state of love to love. Indeed, having a real need to be loved, these people will experience very badly the evolution of the couple.
You will have understood, to love someone is to love him for his qualities and his defects, for the moments of shared happiness but also the difficulties encountered, it is to accept the fact that we can not always agree and understand that our differences are a strength and not an obstacle.
