Love vs. In Love

A recent client was struggling with the concept of love. She knew she loved her boyfriend but she wasn’t sure she was in love with her boyfriend. “Does that even make sense?” she asked.

As we’ve told so many clients: love is easy, relationships can be hard. There’s definitely a difference between loving someone and being in love with them. Love is a natural human emotion. You can’t help it. It happens or it doesn’t. When we experience the feelings of love, we are swept away by them and they seem to take all of the logic out of the atmosphere. Love is the greatest of emotions and all people are looking to feel it.

When we love someone intimately, we may choose to move forward in a relationship with that person. At that point, it is no longer just a feeling - it is a decision. We love that person and we’re choosing to be in love with them. That feeling is great but we’ve got to choose to love who they are as a person - their weird family, their messiness, their moody moments.

When we have emotional love for that other person, we truly want to see them succeed and thrive and grow. When we make the choice to be in love with someone, we are often putting in expectations that they will want the same growth and happiness for us.

Loving someone tends to last even after a relationship is over. This is why we mourn the loss of the relationship and are sad when it ends. The loss of the feeling is difficult, even if the loss of the messiness and moodiness isn’t all that bad.

If emotional love is the natural process, then we can only truly control the relationship part of it. We must choose to jump in with a little extra energy when that person doesn’t have it. We must make the choice to be a member of a team that is working to tackle the everyday challenges of life.

As any parent knows, you can love your kids unconditionally and yet not like them very much when they’re acting out. The same is true for the people in our intimate relationships. We can love our partner deeply, even in the moments where we aren’t feeling very in love with them.

Love is an emotion. “In love” is a choice. It’s the moment when you go “in.” It’s the decision to move forward together and it requires effort from both people in the relationship. If you’re doing all the work and that other person isn’t helping at all… then you may love them but you’re probably not going to be feeling very in love with them in that moment.

The question the client was really asking was much deeper. What she really wanted to know was how to decide if love was enough to overcome the moments when she wasn’t actually in love with her boyfriend. That’s a much bigger question and it’s different for each relationship. Sometimes it comes down to how well we know them. If we know that our partner is capable of great love, then we might be more able to put up with their bad habits, angry moments, or addictions. Sometimes only one of us is in love at the moment and a relationship is going to require pulling our partners through the tough spots. If love is strong, then yes, love is enough to overcome the moments when we don’t really like them much.

After all, love is the most powerful force in the universe. Choosing to be in love should be a powerful decision.

The client knew that she loved her boyfriend and the he was really capable of loving her too. In this instance, we were able to find some ways for the two of them to reconnect on the emotional level so that the power of love could help them get through the things that were beating down their decision to be in a relationship.