How to Know True Love When You Find It

According to Wikipedia the definition of love is “any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment” Well that’s great but if it’s a number of different emotions and experiences how do you know which ones relate to true love? Maybe you’re just strongly attracted to someone? Perhaps you’re mistaking sexual compatability for true love? 

To be perfectly honest, sometimes it’s too easy to get caught up in the hype of what constitutues ‘true love’, and that is when it becomes all to easy to miss out on the realisation of what you really have. And your definition of true love will very probably be different to mine, or anyone else’s for that matter. Love comes in many guises and how we recognise it depends on our own, unique, invidual personalities.

If you can’t recognise true love when it’s in your life, then you’ll probably find you have a hard time holding on to it because you’ll constantly be searching for it.

Often times it’s this lack of insight into what we believe true love to be, that causes so many people to suffer the constant heartbreak associated with the break up of a relationship. Only when the lover becomes an ‘ex lover’ does the realisation dawn that in fact, that relationship was the true love we had been searching for all along. The old saying, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”, is probably never more appropriate than when a relationship breaks up.

And even though you may end up getting back with your ex, if you still haven’t worked out what true love means to you, there’s a very good chance you’ll end up breaking up again. Don’t be tempted into fooling yourself that your ex lover is really your true love simply because you’re feeling devastated by the break up. Often times, even though we know breaking up is the right thing to do, it still hurts. But that hurt is natural. It isn’t a ‘sign’ that you should get back together just to stop hurting. Inevitably, you’ll still hurt, even if you do reconcile.

Until you know what exactly it is you’re looking for, you won’t ever find it, no matter how hard you look, no matter how good your directions, no matter how long you keep looking. This is such basic common sense and yet, when love comes through the door, common sense flies out the window.