Was this real love?

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After reading a thread on another forum I feel that it's time to clear up a puzzle.


In 2008 A friend had invited me to an after-show party for a play she had been acting in, and I was introduced to one of the other actresses, whom we will call N. Somewhere around midnight we stepped outside the house for a casual chat. This ended up lasting for about TWO AND A HALF HOURS! She did most of the talking, but I found her interesting enough to just keep her going. Anyway, at the end of it it was time to go home. My friend, who'd been watching me, urged me to get her number, but I did not. I was too embarassed and too chicken, and I knew that asking for someone's number is usually a precursor to asking them out. The idea of asking her out made my nerves turn to jelly - I didn't know whether I fancied her and I wasn't prepared to do anything until I was damn sure I did.

The following morning I could not stop asking my friend questions about N. I left for home on the other side of the city...and missed N intensely most of the day, EVERY DAY for the following fortnight. This is most uncharacteristic - I rarely miss anybody and even then it is only my family and close friends. I did end up meeting her again three months later, and although some of those emotions returned it was not with the intensity that I had them before.

Was it love I felt for her? Honestly, I have no idea. It had a different quality about it to any of the other crushes I've had, and nobody else has made me miss them for that long after I've just met them. Even so, I wrote it off as a crush simply because that's all I've previously known and it's much easier to handle the experience that way.


So, what do you think? Was it love, a crush, or limerance?

Definitely a crush, maybe even lust.

If the emotions didn't return to the same intensity and you only talked for a few hours I'd say it was more lust than love.

"Love" is a subjective term.

Remember that as Aspies, we tend to take things much more seriously than everyone else. N is probably not even thinking twice about it. But for you, because you take things so seriously, and this was a glimpse of something maybe you've never had, and because your emotions are more pronounced than most people's, what to them seems like an everyday occurence to you seems like the opportunity of a lifetime.

Any relationship is based on what fits the particpants' inner landscape, never altruism, and I believe one of the reasons Aspies have such a hard time is that people can tell right off that many of us just can't provide them with what they're looking for.

Given that this was in 2008 and you're still thinking about and it sounds like you haven't heard from the person again I would say it may be a good idea to look elsewhere.

I'm not still thinking about it, I've just never concretely identified what it was. I'm definitely over her now and have been since shortly after I met her the second time. I'm not still hoping to get together with her at all.



I've heard that lust is a desire to have sex. I've never felt that with anyone.

Trademark obsessive interest, that's all. The fact the feelings wern't as intesnse as before I doubt it was lust, but maybe a small short lived crush.

Love is something deeper and something that takes longer to develop.

What is love?

Love is any of a number of emotions related to a sense of strong affection[1] and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my wife"). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

As an abstract concept, love usually refers to a deep, ineffable feeling of tenderly caring for another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual emotional closeness of familial and platonic love[2] to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love.[3] Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

-Wikipedia

Scientifically, it's nothing but your attraction to another person causing certain chemicals to go to certain parts of your brain, causing you to become obsessed and act irrationally, though it admittedly makes you happy - putting you on a natural high in a way - until it all goes tumbling down or the feelings begin to die after a few years.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewisKyyuF78[/youtube]


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpN60KKBAjc[/youtube]



I don't think love defines one single phenomenon. I mean there are surely different concepts that are related to the same linguistic category. I love pizza in a different way than I love my fiance. I love my mother in a different way than I love being in the woods. What you felt may have been infatuation. This sometimes precedes romantic love. Sometimes it doesn't. Many people, both NT and on the spectrum, confuse infatuation or lust for romantic love. When that initial high fades they believe that the love is gone. I would say NT's probably struggle with that more because some folks on the spectrum are uncomfortable naming a feeling as love too quickly. Love is what you want it to be within reason.

I'm not sure this is a very helpful question to ask. I used to ask it all the time, and it never got me anywhere.

NTs, who for better or worse define our emotional vocabulary, call seemingly hundreds of different feelings love. Even if you narrow it down to what could be considered "romantic" or "sexual" relationships, NTs are constantly using the word "love" to refer to all sorts of different emotions in the context of very different sorts of relationships. (Granted, these feelings are different in the way that blood red is different from brick red from magenta from fuschia, but these are still meaningful differences).

There are two questions you could be asking. IMO, one is helpful, and one isn't.

The first question: what emotions am I feeling towards this person? What do I want from them? How does it differ from the feelings I've had for other people I was romantically interested in in some way?

How do you know? Just sit there and inhabit the emotion for a while (meditation style pure awareness, be here now, etc...) until the emotions solidify for you, you can feel them strongly, and call them up whenever you want. Now you can compare them. This one person who I watched from afar and never got the courage to speak to, do I feel the same thing for them as I feel for my girlfriend of two months? What's different? Why might my feelings be different? (Now you can start being analytical and thinking about the difference between the relationships...what a relief).

To make a long story short, this question is all about: what is the MEANING of love, regardless of what you call it? This is a great question, but kinda hard to discuss unless you're REALLY good at describing your feelings in words.

The second question is the one that people seem to debate more often: what does the word "love" mean? What does it refer to?

The problem is that people confuse the second question with the first, and they try to make life decisions based on their beliefs about how people use the word "love."

I don't have any great real-life examples, so here's one from literature. In "Anna Karenina," a young girl, Kitty, has to choose between two men. One of them, Vronsky, is exciting and romantic, but she can't quite imagine doing something prosaic like eating breakfast with him every day. The other, Levin, is more like an old friend, and she can imagine spending everyday life with him for the rest of her life. The first is more like the romantic ideal, the second is more like what old married couples are like. She has strong romantic feelings of some sort for each of them. She decides that she'll choose the one she "loves," but which is that? She doesn't realizes that she's really asking about the meaning of the word "love." Does the word "love" refer to what she feels for Vronsky, or what she feels for Levin? She decides at first that "love" means what she feels for Vronsky, and chooses him, which turns out to be the wrong choice (he's the guy who ends up having an affair with Anna Karenina). (Don't worry, there's a happy ending...she later marries Levin and basically lives happily ever after). Anyway, the point is, she was asking the wrong question.

"Love," "crush," "limerence," "obsession," etc., are just labels that we slap on different feelings. I don't think a conversation like this is very helpful because we have no idea if we're talking about the same experience, and if what I mean when I say "love" or "crush" is the same as what you mean when you use the same words. Anyone have any solutions to this problem?