Is it “True love”?
When people ask if it is true love, they often get a list of platitudes on what makes a good long term relationship. This article is based on a response to one such list:
https://jamesmsama.medium.com/is-it-real-love-heres-how-to-tell-3810ed871a93
All are true, but definitely not what they’re looking for. They want something more “clinical”.
A clinical definition of true love is that it is a type of “addiction”. It is mother nature’s way of getting two people to want to see each other by creating a chemical drug “hit” every time you see them. Call it oxytocin or endorphins or whatever — but it is extremely addictive and as powerful as heroin. What you feel as “love” is nothing less than a drug induced “high”. All of that “can’t stop thinking of you”, “butterflies” , “nervousness”, etc. etc. It’s a drug induced hit. You literally feel “happy/high” to just see them, you want to do it more and more. Having bedroom fun also greatly reinforces this.
It’s not very romantic when stated in such a clinical manner, but nature and evolution don’t care — they just want you to get together and procreate. So how do you know you’ve reached this point of “true love” addiction? Just like a true addict, if you cut off the drug, you will go into severe withdrawal symptoms. This is typically called a “broken heart” where you just feel depressed, sad, hopeless and lie on the beach like a dead whale. So congratulations, if you totally crash after your breakup, then you were in love. That is the “test” if you were looking for one. If you weren’t in “love”, then you just might be “meh”, life goes on. Unfortunately, you have to break up in order to test this and this is why we say you don’t know what you got until you lose it.
However, like most addictive drugs, the effects tend to wear off and you need more and more just to get the same “high” as before. Sometimes, it may wear off entirely and suddenly when you see this person, you feel “nothing”. This is very natural and happens so frequently, that it should simply be “expected”. So, if you’re counting on “love” to be as intense and enduring as it was in the start, you are on very shaky grounds. So does true love last forever??? The ugly truth is — NO. You might experience some level of the love drug on an ongoing basis, but for most people, it may wear off.
But this where this list of boring common sense platitudes come into play. These have little to do with the actual clinical “real love” addiction you may feel. However, they are great for transitioning your relationship into a stable and healthy state which is more similar for what you feel for your best friend or close family members. This doesn’t require frequent dopamine hits to sustain. They make you happy in other more sustainable ways. By evolutionary design, the “love” addiction is just there to get you “hooked”. From there, it is up to you to build a more lasting and solid relationship.
So there is the clinical answer to the question — Is is true love? This is an answer that makes sense and fits with our experiences and actually explains our actions of why we feel happy/giddy/in love or have a heart break. From a practical standpoint, it really doesn’t have much bearing on the long term stability of a relationship since it is mostly there to get you to have initial bedroom fun and keep the species going. So this tends to cause a lot of confusion about what “love” is (a chemical addiction to a person) and what you need to keep a long term relationship going. They are two completely separate and different things, but people tend to attribute “love” with the list of boring things that keep a relationship healthy and that just causes unnecessary confusion. So see “love” for what it is and its importance in a long term relationship and know that it won’t keep you together on its own.