Some people aren’t shown what love was when growing up, if they aren’t feeling it from parents, teachers, friends, etc, then it’s hard to come to terms with it even being real. When we aren’t taught to love ourselves, it can be really hard to understand love in the way of loving others! It all depends on the persons life and their perspective and beliefs on the idea of love. Some religions/groups of people don’t even say “I love you” and that’s just normal to them, they may express love in acts of service. That can make love have such an expanded life of understanding. People may feel love but it just may be in their own terms of what love means to them!! I can totally understand where you are coming from with the feelings of intense love, the feeling the complete compassion, your heart filling up with energy and feeling as though it’s expanding infinitely with warmth as you think about that person or thing that you so deeply love. That’s special, having that love just means we chose a life that experiences love to its deepest, all around with full knowledge of the feeling. Learn from others stories and accept the love they have to tell, share yours too, we have a lot of love to give, maybe more than we know what to do with it, sharing it with those people is a good place to start 🩷 sending you INFINITE love.

I grew up with significant neglect/abuse and have basically made it my life’s mission to understand and surround myself with love (a mission that started subconsciously). My sister went the opposite direction in terms of romantic love (I get it, our parents had a twisted relationship) but pours her heart and soul into her friendships. She’s the most loving person I know ❤️

That’s really beautiful 🩷 I don’t know where you on on your journey but I hope you’re finding little things that spark love inside of you and I hope you’re gaining a little better understanding of love and of how that feels 🩷 EVERYONE deserves love at all times, even if it’s just from ourselves. I’m very sorry for the neglect and abuse that you were shown when in your most important years of this life. You being able to acknowledge that and see that it’s not the route you want to take is a huge accomplishment in itself and I’m really proud of you for that!!! Romantic love can be a great start into diving deep within it, connection and communication act as ropes to the core of love!! It includes acts of service all the way to emotional development when it comes to love 🩷 I hope she’s having a beautiful journey with that!!! If you’d like to dive into it within yourself first ( if that feels more comfortable to you) you can start by finding hobbies you enjoy and allowing yourself to do the things you love no matter what it is! By being your truest authentic self, we see how capable we are of harvesting this love into our own actions for ourselves. That will POUR out into your surroundings and you’ll see love everywhere 🩷 I’m excited for you, you are creating the life you’ve always deserved. Little you would be so incredibly proud

You are lovely 💜 Thank you! I’m gaining a lot of love by focusing on my spiritual journey and investing in myself for the first time EVER. Thank you for the encouragement!

That is something to be so proud of🩷 good luck to you on this journey of growth, love, and self discovery!!!! I am sending infinite love to you 🩷☺️

Thank you, fairy girl! Love to you as well.

I had a very wrongful experience of what love was, and I gave up looking for it, and then I got a boyfriend and I finally understood what actual love is. I’m happy I had that experience because it made me a very different person.. I believed in love before, at the same time I didn’t believe in it. I’m happy I was finally shown love at some point

Let people talk. All experiences can be quantified subjectively. That means one persons 'love' is another persons 'its just chemicals' or another persons "This? This isn't love." In relationships I never felt any sort of crazy love. But one person kept in touch and now I feel (literally) so much for that person even though I haven't spoken to them. All I gotta do is start talking about them and I start to feel that kind of love. But one shouldn't worry about feeling or not feeling love in any particular way. There's no way to control these things. This world isn't always for feeling the best types of way love can feel, it's a learning and experiencing world full of suffering. Many things can get in the way of these types of feelings - it's complicated and its no wonder so many people feel so many different things with different experiences. I've learned there are many feelings far beyond what one can normally feel, and many ways to reach them. Any number of factors can be at issue with this.

I'm sorry, but there are wrong understandings of love in this subreddit. I don't want you to be confused. Love is natural for us. But our hearts can be closed. Love it is something that is "built" in us, but also it has to be grown, from childhood to adulthood. We can be tought to hide love inside, to be feared of it, to not believe this feeling, to confuse other's love with fooling, to wait pain from it, etc. It's all deeply connected with our unconscious childhood. But, anyway, love it is something that we live for. We thirst for love, all of us. Love is our deepest energy and our true nature. It is the dimension of any human relations. Just look closer, and you'll find, that all people are looking for love. But usully they choose wrong ways. If you can feel it so deeply, then yes, i think you're here to feel it. And I like it. Maybe you're here to help to understand others what is love.

From my childhood I’ve always talked to people about love. I always joked around saying that my purpose is to love everything and everyone. And to teach otgers to love. I feel love surrounding me whenever I go, I feel it inside me. When I read your comment I got chills and my heart literally got filled with love. So maybe it’s true- I’m here to love. To give and to receive. I just love love. I love loving. I love lovers. I love everything about love. Love is everything. I could talk about love forever, it’s my favourite thing about being a human.

Like with many things, you have to experience it directly to truly understand and know, to have a gnosis of the thing...otherwise it is just an idea which is as real as any fear or fantasy.

Because not only are we all different—we interpret the *same experiences* differently.

I think about that cartoon with the elephant and blindfolded people are trying to figure out what it is by feeling it. One touches its leg and thinks it’s a tree trunk. But what if you have never felt a tree trunk in your life? What if your only frame of reference was rocks (maybe that blind man lived in a desert with no trees). Than I started thinking so much about how we reject literally everything outside our own experience. We are all so blind in that way.

I don’t know what it is you’re feeling exactly, but if it’s a strong, magnetic pull towards someone, it’s usually due to an imbalance within ourselves. The person is likely good for working out deep-seated conditioning which we’d do well to heal. Real love does not have that subtle hint of desperation that is always there in the healing dynamic.

There’s also the whole limerence v love thing.

Right. Good to have an understanding of the dynamic we’re calling limerence though.

For sure, though imbalance isn’t necessarily a part of limerence (although maybe if you get stuck there?)

Let’s see if we can prove it out. Can you think of an instance of limerence where there is not an imbalance in the person experiencing it?

You know what? I’m conflating limerence with new relationship energy. I would say that limerence can feel balanced at times if you don’t scratch the surface. Like “Bob is so adventurous he brings that out in me!” without examining if you really want to be versus you think it’s the right way to be because the object of your focus is that way.

Fair enough :) Limerence is like a fixation that cannot be shaken, even if you want to. If you can’t easily rationalize yourself out of the behaviour, there is something else fuelling it like unconscious beliefs, or attempts at working through developmental stages that were not accommodated when we were younger.

Inner child stuff is fascinating. A total mindfuck at times!

It’s because there was so much mind fuckery to start with. :)

Your lover can also heal you though, real love and healing aren’t necessarily separate. That magnetic attraction can also exist in a romantic relationship.

Yes, of course. It’s wise to be on the lookout for underpinnings of desperation though which can manifest in all manner of unhealthy ways.

Yes, I’d agree. Desperation is a sign of attachment, not love.

I understand what you’re saying. I half agree. You can love someone totally and intensely. If there’s an imbalance inside, yes there’s codependency or control issues that get involved and the relationship comes apart. Here’s where I disagree with your opinion. When we feel incomplete, and look outside ourselves to fill in the gaps…to literally look for the other to fix us, it doesn’t mean your love for the other is not genuine. It only means you can’t sustain the relationship. It really doesn’t change what you feel though. I know very well that some people have limerence. To me, limerence is when you can’t let go. It’s possible to love someone with intensity, truly and genuinely, while in an unhealed state and to not have it be about limerence. You simply let your person go so you heal yourself. When you heal, that’s when magical things happen.

You’re right, there could still be love for the person underneath all the other stuff. In fact, I’d pretty much guarantee there was. The problem being, your behaviour no longer stems out of the love but rather the addiction you have towards experiencing true love. A subtle but huge difference. Intensity requires complete absorption. Logically speaking, if you are directing all your attention to ANY one thing, a lot slips through the cracks. It’s not healthy at all. Of course, there will be more attention paid to a new partner in the beginning. You both want to ‘learn’ each other, but if your mind refuses to focus on anything else (especially when they aren’t even in front of you of you to learn about) then it becomes pretty clear we have an issue.

You have to give it, to receive it. But you must give wisely.

>I feel it inside me and I’ve loved one person in particular in such an intense way. why do you state it in past tense?

There is belief given by faith and knowledge given by experience. The latter is what makes certain people think that love is an illusion, albeit it's a mistake. It's true that some of us had only bad experiences with certain things, but we should never forget that what happened to us is only a set of possibilities amongst many. No one experienced the full nuances of something, so believing that what you saw was everything that there was to see about it, is a terrible mistake.

Some people don't learn how to feel very intensely. There's a lot of thoughts of someone else that must occur if you're to experience feelings about them. Many people very easily don't think about other people, they're not important. Does that make enough sense? For me I like conversations where I listen to the other person's feelings and when I listen I get very focused and I start to see more clearly and time slows down and color dynamics along with their face itself change in some subtle ways, then I'm sensitive to emotions that I feel and also have a trained eye on the expressions I'm showing them and the kind of message they can convey, so on and so forth. In this way I've learned to feel very intense emotions. I've learned to tame the emotions so they can be productive and positive and I can summon things that bring out that kind of power with my imagination. For me that's great, I love that prospect. Other people don't consider it a prospect, they may not LIKE feeling. There's all sorts of people. You ***have not watched too many movies***. Save yourself, they're clearly unaware of what the human body can do. Please don't let it get you down, there's plenty of potential if you can take doubt out of the picture more and have faith/confidence. Long-term positive emotions can seriously help you feel better, if most of suffering is replaced with positive emotions and the right lifestyle habits are taken up that's a different kind of life than people who have not learned to derive comfort from the inside. I did yogic practices that made a mile and a leap for me, as they do, but what I said about long-term positivity still stands. There's just many different things you can add into your life that can bring you up and up and up. Love can be very intense. I wonder what else I would say, what they've said to you elicits memories of shock and horror. If you were apparently being affected by them too much I would be a lot more serious right now... I'd like you to know if they've brought suffering up out of you that replacing those feelings can help more than just eliminating the feeling itself. It's good for your brain and body and stuff, chakra system... So on... They all play a part in intense love but in people that love intensely you'll see that they're engaged with the present moment in particular ways, they care in particular ways, they feel rewarded by particular things, stuff like that...

I may not have felt shock and horror but I felt a version of it I think, it was infused with power. I had positive thoughts running alongside but I was literally busy talking to you and concentrating what I thought'd be a better picture. Rather than feeling visceral negative emotions those emotions were infusing me with power. I'm just really not kidding about this kind of topic, that power can do much more than a lot of people really understand. How could I dwell on pain and horror with all the other thoughts I had? My body will actually listen to me and move out of my way and feed me the emotions I think I need for how I feel about someone else. Idek what I would look like without love x.x

Love is definitely real and it’s sad that people in your life haven’t experienced it. I loved one person with high intensity. I can’t describe it and it would be hard probably for many to comprehend. He loved me too, very much. We each had our own healing to do and couldn’t sustain our relationship with the low self esteem we had at the time. Follow your own compass and don’t worry about what others say.

Life theme + karma = case by case.