How Can You Tell When Someone Genuinely Loves You

Ever so often we go around professing that we are so much in love, but the question is, do we really know what is love? The love your partner professes he/she has for you, or what you yourself thought you were feeling could be something very misleading!

Some experts believe love is a feeling of deep affection for and attachment to another person. Love has been defined also as the emotional glue that binds two people together. It has been said that when we love someone, we want to be physical close, to spend time together, to get to know the other person completely, and to do things to please the other person. However, it's believed that the specific experience of love differs from one person to another.

According to one psychologist,love varies from one relationship to another because its mix of components differ. He believes love has the following three possible components:

1.Intimacy

2. Passion

3. Commitment

Intimacy- he defines as the emotional component of love; it's that feeling of closeness, when two people are bound together by mutual affection. It's the process by which people try to get emotionally close to each other by exploring similarities and differences in the ways they think, feel, and behave. People in an intimate relationship show their intimacy by being physically close to each other. When they are walking, talking or working on shared project, their bodies often brush. They may hold hands, embrace, or kiss. Sex is the ultimate form of closeness.

Intimacy is not an act, but a quality, and many people who are intimate in other ways don't express their bond sexually. Yet sex helps to establish intimacy, because it involves intimate touching and forces us to lower some of our social barriers. Thus, most people consider sex an important part of intimacy, but not nearly as important as sharing thoughts,feelings, and dreams. The emotion of love usually accompanies intimate relationships.

Passion - Has been described as the motivational component of love -- the drive that leads to romance, physical attraction, and sexual consummation.

Commitment - is defined as the cognitive component of love, which is the decision to label a certain relationship "love", and the effort to maintain that relationship over time. Different types of love,is said to have different amounts of intimacy,passion and commitment.

Based on findings, there are six types of love:

1. Infatuation (Love At First Sight)
2. Empty Love
3. Romantic Love
4. Companionate Love
5. Fatuous Love
6. Consummate Love

Infatuation - is passion alone; there is no commitment or intimacy involved.

Empty Love - exist when a person is committed to a relationship where there is no passion or intimacy.

Romantic Love - Here there is intimacy and passion, but there not much commitment ( though commitment may come later).

Companionate Love - When passion is absent, but intimacy and commitment are both present. It's the kind of love that sometimes occurs after years of marriage.

Fatuous Love - There is Passion and commitment but no intimacy involves. This the type of love that is found in a marriage that follows a whirlwind courtship. The partner s have a strong sexual attraction and have decided to share lives, but they have not developed much knowledge of each other or deep feelings or emotional closeness.

*Consummate Love - The love that has been considered the richest of all love; it consist of all three components of love( intimacy,passion and commitment).

Liking which we often confused with love is believed to consist of intimacy without passion or commitment.

Conclusion

Having read all the above information, hopefully, we should all be convinced that beyond all reasonable doubts "love" is complex! Love also varies from one relationship to another because not all relationships have the same mixture of its three components(Intimacy,Passion, Commitment). Also the love you might have been giving or receiving could be something entirely different from the love another person might be receiving or experiencing. Based on the above reasoning, I think it's fair to say that consummate love is genuine love.