How to Know You are in Love
The Quick and Dirty Guide
As discussed in earlier posts love is a weird thing, a hard thing, and what many to believe to be utterly mysterious. We never really know how it happens, or why, or when, but one day we wake up to our better half laying awkwardly next to us and it hits us, I love that multi-limbed, tongue wagging, bag of flesh. How do we know we are in love though, and it isn’t just last nights tacos giving us a fiery burning from within?
Reason #1:
There are people that we like, people that we thoroughly enjoy, and spend endless hours with, but that we don’t feel the butterflies flowing for. The first way to tell you are in love is the mythical “spark”. This is a phenomenon that is very hard to describe in the lack luster words that we can put on a page, but the best way to describe it, is you’ll just “know”. You get a special tingle in your toes every time the person looks your way. A smile cracks on your face when you think about how terrible you are at Jenga compared to them. Electricity flows through your veins like a firefly on a warm summers night. It is just that “special” feeling.
Reason #2:
You never have a subconscious need to not make time for them. Nothing is more important to you than the time that you get to spend with them. Those taxes undergoing an audit? Nah, no time for that, you must see your significant other. The words, “No, sorry I am too busy right now.” never come out of you mouth to them. Time is valuable to you, yes, but time with them is utterly priceless. You are in love, don’t waste another moment without them by your side.
Reason #3:
You strive to have new experiences with them. Routine is great, but the new and exciting is even better. Life has so many bounties to offer all 7 billion of us, but what makes every experience better? What really brings out the brightest colors of the wild flowers, the crystal clear air of the mountain spring, or the warm touch of the golden sand with a light breeze across your cheeks? Love. The new and the unknown is nothing without them entangling fingers with you, as soft light glistens in your eye.
Reason #4:
You want to be a better you. Not because they tell you to be better, or that they try and change anything about you, you are doing it because you want to be the DaVinci to their Mona Lisa. You are not satisfied with yourself until you they die happy. Satisfaction with yourself is not something that will ever come to you, but that doesn’t matter because you know you are only going to become better and better for the one you now know you love. To die happy, is to die with knowing you never wasted a minute making a better life for yourself and the one you cared most about.
Reason #5:
Your mind and your heart have no conflict. Your heart is swollen with emotion, they are perfect in your eyes, and your heart is ready to burst from the affection you have from them. Your mind, logical and never ending in thought, has no reservations. Every twist and turn in your deft cranium does not slip into a corner of darkness, hiding the thieves of love. The Venn Diagram between your heart and mind, make nothing but a circle. The arrow on the bulls-eye is split perfectly in twine by head and heart. Finally, take a coin. Heads you are in love, tails you are not. Flip the coin. As it rotates head over tail, shining in the light, what are you hoping for? Heads? Tails? Regardless of how the circular metal piece lands, you know your answer. What you hoped for in the air, gives you your answer, pure and unadulterated.
Take a minute for reflection, think about what you have just read. Was there someone you had in mind the whole time? If not, that is ok, you now know either what you have to do, or how you must move on. Stop convincing yourself you are in love, and move on, better to end it now than wallow in self pity and never truly be happy. If you did have that ever so special, delightful, and wonderful person in mind, then hats off to you good sir. You are ready to embark on what will likely be the most terrible, painful, and difficult journey you have ever experienced, but it will be magnificent and a memory carved in stone for eternity, more fanciful than any movie ever could portray.
