I think it’s pretty cliché to open this post with “Remember, everyone’s different.” You can’t just say, “Here are some ways to tell you are absolutely in love” because everyone’s experience with love can be different, yet just as genuine as the next. While this statement is cliché for a reason, I have noticed a pattern in the love cycle of life.
Just like most American girls, I grew up dreaming and fantasizing about the one true love that would come along and sweep me off my feet – the typical Disney princess movie or Taylor Swift love song – not realizing that I would have to kiss many frogs before I would recognize my prince as the man standing behind me all along. In a way, you could say that I learned how to expect the unexpected by watching other real to life love stories. I’m not saying I knew who I was going to fall in love with, because I didn’t! I went through many “this is going to be the one because he’s so weird” and “this is going to be the one because he was my nemesis as a child.” But I did know that it was going to be one of the last people I expected it to be, which is typically the way it works. So, yes, I expected the man that I would fall madly in love with to be exactly opposite of what I thought I would want to fall in love with, while knowing all along, that he would make me more than perfectly content. That sentence is so confusing that it makes my brain hurt, but it is very true.
As a Christian woman on a journey of growing up, the stress swelled greater with every birthday. I knew that to find true love, I not only had to find the man that fit the description in my mind, but he needed to have the same moral principles that I had to have a healthy, long-lasting relationship. So, I watched people around me, casually interviewed many about how they got paired up with their significant other. Every answer was always the same, “You just know.” Every person, even my parents came up with the whole, “One day, you just realize, that’s the one you want to spend your life with.” And again I would ask, but how do you really know what love is? What is it, in words? How can you say, “I love this person because…”? Over a good 7-10 years of doing this, and finally not finding the love of my life, but he finding me -- I have finally cracked the code. What is love and how do you really know that what you’re experiencing is true love.
Side note: Because of the fact that I am a Christian, I would normally add some lines about how God brought my love and I together through His plan and how there are many types of love, but none greater than that of Christ. But that’s another blog for another day. I want to speak to a mixed audience and apply this to anyone reading, no matter what you believe in. Let me make that clear: NO MATTER WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN, THIS CAN APPLY TO YOU.
5 Signs You’re Probably In Love:
1) Material things are not relevant any longer. This is the last and hardest lesson that I learned about true love, which is exactly why I am making it numero uno. I’m not really even talking about inanimate object material things; I’m talking about letting go of material expectations. I grew up in a little town in Georgia that is so tiny, if you blink your eyes in the car ride to the mountains, you’ve missed seeing my hometown. With the small, country town comes the small, country town attitude and rebel heart. My sister and I wore, and still wear, cowboy boots, jeans, and t-shirts. When we aren’t wearing boots, we’re wearing sneakers or flip-flops. So, naturally, the image of the man of my dreams was wearing boots and a white Hanes t-shirt, sitting up in a big, jacked up truck with a gun rack across the back window. When I started falling for the man I now call my love, the khaki shorts, chacos, and Altima he was driving were some things that definitely threw me off. When I realized how much I loved him, those things attracted me to him even more. I’m still the same girl who listens to country music and grows corn, but I have to admit… chacos rock.
2) You feel completely comfortable in your own skin. I’m not talking about you feel instantly skinny where you felt fat before. But you subconsciously know that no matter what you look like, it will never cause that person to stop loving you. I can get all dressed up to go out on a Friday night and will tell me how beautiful I look. Those kinds of compliments feel great. But on a Monday night when I’m loaded down with homework and I’m wearing an oversized Pikachu t-shirt and no makeup with glasses on my face and my hair in a ball on top of my head, this is when he’s attracted to me most. At that moment, when he tells me how beautiful I am, there’s a different stare in his eyes. He means it more than ever.
3) You are best friends. When I’m approached with the idea of love at first sight, I can’t say that I really believe in it. I believe that you can see who you’re going to fall in love with and have an immediate attraction to them. You can have a feeling, or even know that they are the one. But you don’t reach that point of really loving them until you really know them. They become your closest friend, the one you spill everything to. Where before when you would say to your best bud or your best girlfriend, “I’m only going if you’re going.” Or “If you do it with me, I’ll do it too.” This becomes how it is with love. You’re content anywhere, as long as they are by your side. You get to a point where you can’t even hide something from them if you tried because they just know you too well. I knew that I was in love when being with my love was as second nature as being with my sister. It’s just so natural.
4) Dreams for the futur, change. This isn’t always a big change, but with me, it was pretty drastic. I go to school and study English writing with publication and English education because I have to have a sound career in the future. I picked writing because my parents were sending me to a good school and I had to pick something. I love writing and expressing myself through words, but my first passion was music. I originally went to school for music, but realizing that classical styles were going to be the death of me, I dropped the music program and went full force into writing and education. My dream was still music. As a little girl that could barely walk and annunciate words correctly, I would disappear at church and my parents would find me on stage, singing the best I could next to the choir director and the Sunday morning special. I wanted nothing more than to sing and play guitar on stage in front of everyone on earth. But it was overnight that I realized fame is the furthest thing from what I really want. When my love told me that his dream was to find a job that would allow him to comfortably return to his family every night and to hold his future wife in his arms and make sure she was safe and secure, my dream changed instantly. I suddenly wanted to be that future wife that he would return home to.
5) Trust is love. This week, as part of a homework assignment, I had to watch a Spanish video and translate what it was about. It just happened to be a couple talking about how jealousy had ripped them apart for more than a year before they realized they really loved each other and nothing could keep them apart. While jealousy is a natural attribute of humanity and will exist in every relationship, true love can be such an eye opener and a terminator of it. The key to keeping a happy relationship is trust. Trust eliminates intense jealousy. It still exist, but at a lesser rate. I still get a little feisty when one of my man’s ex-girlfriends see him in public and come up and try to hug him. I have a natural sense to snub them and remind them that he’s not theirs anymore. But I don’t distrust him at all. I know that I’m the one he loves and that if he wanted one of those girls, he would still be with them and we would have never happened. But he is mine and he pays those other girls no attention. He’s polite, as any good man would be, but he doesn’t do anything to purposely make me jealous or I, him, because he wants what is best for me and wants me to be happy.
<5signsyoureprobablyinlove> <love> <happiness> <healthylove> <truelove>