IS LOVE REALLY A "SECOND-HAND EMOTION"?
Infatuation is an incredible, addictive feeling. It's intense, exciting and heady. We feel so incredibly ALIVE, it's nearly impossible not to get high on the sensations it generates in us!
Powerful, pleasure-producing chemical changes in our brain and bloodstream convince us, "this is REAL, and we're meant to be together." Add to this, we're able to fall a little in love with ourselves, under their adoring gaze, and BAM! We're hooked.
Love takes off more gradually, and builds to a softer, more steady burn that endures over a far greater span of time. Unless you've been lucky enough to experience both, you're unable to make this distinction.
Strangers have called me crying uncontrollably, after only 2 - 3 months with a Borderline who seduced, then ghosted or dropped them. These people were totally convinced that what they had, was "Real Love."
[How do you think I was able to write 25 articles on this one topic?! I transcribed HUNDREDS of identical, painful stories that were shared with me, in the aftermath of these BPD relationships ending!]
Love endures, once it's established. Infatuation is fleeting~ but it seems like the genuine article when you're in the middle of it, because humans are gullible and naive enough to think, "if it feels this good, it MUST be love!"
Most people who marry are deeply "in love." When the novelty of their infatuation settles, and the Honeymoon stage fades a bit in the midst of daily life routines, they may eventually divorce. How can you LOVE someone intensely at the start of a romance, and have it fall apart so dismally, that you end up seeing each other as enemies?!
Maybe it wasn't actually love in the first place. Maybe it was mind-blowing sex. Maybe it was the romantic little getaways. Maybe it was feeling you had so much in common with the other, you could never imagine being without them...
but getting to really KNOW someone is not just about recognizing mutual similarities in the early stages of your dance. It's about tolerating the differences you inevitably discover in each other as you get better acquainted, which test that blissful, chemically-infused state you relished in the beginning, and could never have fathomed would change or end.
Tina Turner sang, "What's love got to do with it?" From where I sit, it's often far too little.