No offense to the great romantics, but in this article we will be discussing the different components of love and investigating everything from attraction to the feeling of the simple admiration, until the initial attachment leaves us feeling perplexed and confused.
Love is essential for our fulfilment
For a long time, love has been the most talked about subject of painters, poets and philosophers. It is also the most agreeable feeling. Love is essential to our fulfilment. Human beings need to create emotional bonds and also need to feel tenderness to survive, and especially, to love and to be loved. The art of loving is built through many stages of feelings. In fact, love emerges through the emotional journey of experiencing certain feelings in a certain order.
Physical attraction is one of the main initial interactions of a love attraction.
Two people who do not know each other can fall in love physically. This attraction comes from a desire or memory of a person from our childhood. This is what creates the impression of déjà vu when meeting a person. We want more than anything in the world to find a person with whom we have something in common, and complicity promotes attraction.
This attraction is obviously a question of "feeling" the moment of a meeting, one where we have an impression of being on the same wavelength. But this feeling is not always reciprocal. Being of a romantic nature, we believe that everything is going well, that the feeling is mutual, but the perception of each person is always different, and for each individual, things are not necessarily as they appear to be on the surface.
Now let's talk about admiration, while taking into consideration that admiration and love are two different feelings.
"To love is to admire with the heart, but to admire is to love with the spirit," says Alfredo La Mont.
We idealize the other person; we attribute virtues to them that we do not have ourselves. We see them as being a wonderful person who meets all our needs and satisfies our fantasies. In a relationship, admiration is born of the knowledge and recognition of each other. Physical beauty, the professional status of the person, all of these can create feelings of admiration, and the components of this feeling of love can reach to infinity.
Affection is a natural feeling, but it is also a natural forerunner to attachment, not to be confused with love. The confusion between love and affection arises in particular from a variety of emotions: for example, when wondering if a relationship will last or through the fear of suffering a break-up.
Whatever the stage of the relationship, the person with a feeling of attachment to the other may form a relationship based on co-dependency regarding the other person. However, there are also very beautiful love stories that can arise from feelings of affection, just as the path develops between friendship and love, here we are talking about the alchemy of love. We like to spend time with this person, we share the same interests. There is tenderness and caring, we know each other very well and we have confided different things to them for a long time. Some love stories are born out of affection from a great friendship, and these are often the most solid relationships, according to some American studies. This was the case for Julian and Alice who had an ambiguous relationship at the time of their meeting.
"I was always in search of his happiness, he was my best friend but I did not realise that my happiness had become his wish also. I was planning the future; I did not want to be limited to friendship anymore. It was then that I understood that we didn’t only have an attachment, nor simply affection, but that this was love! The feelings were reciprocal and today we have been together for 6 years! "
Love is a deep feeling of emotions. Over time, it changes, evolves, matures and takes another turn, that of attachment, kindness, tolerance, and commitment.
