How do you know it is love?
Forget words. Words you can throw around by the two hundred for pennies. I love you, my darling, can be tossed out without any accounting.
And here is a question even more important on the practical level: how do you distinguish love from infatuation?
Being in love is a thrilling state. Uplifting. And temporary. Everyone remembers with longing their periods of butterflies. There is a claim that the body even remembers and records that magical sensation.
But that is precisely what it is. A sensation. Something physiological you feel in the body. Cynics will even say that infatuation is no more than a by-product of intense sexual attraction.
But love is already a different story.
Here we are no longer talking about hormones. Here we are talking about something closer to a contract.
All right, perhaps not a contract a lawyer would need to draft, but a deep and serious and long-term bond based on reciprocity. Actual terms which define, unconsciously, how the relationship is supposed to proceed.
Think about it. Love can last twenty and thirty years. Love can include situations in which a person shouts at his beloved and still has not the slightest shadow of doubt that he loves her.
In other words, love is complicated.
So how will we know it is love?
I have watched couples for years in whom love seems to me to reign, and compared them with couples who have spent years in a desert of resentment and hostility. And here is one very important difference between those two groups.
The loving ones protect the other person's standing when the other person is not in the room.
That is the practical definition. Not the declarations, not the anniversaries, not the photographs. What you say about them to your friends, to your mother, to a colleague, when there is no cost to saying anything you like.
Contempt leaks first in absentia. So does love.