How do you know when you love someone?

Good question – and good job on you for actually bothering to ask! It seems most people don’t care – in fact most people think love is the same as lust, and that it’s totally cool to be as possessive as possible.

Okay, so you think you might love this person, but you’re not sure. Here are a series of questions you can ask yourself to find out if you really love this person or not:

• Picture this person 20-40 years in the future, with wrinkles and grey hair (or bald)… do you think you’ll love them then?
• Imagine this person has some tragic accident in which they lose their… well… if it’s a woman, imagine they lose their boobs, if it’s a guy, imagine he loses his dangly bits… do you still love this person and want to be with them?
• Imagine this person has a sex change… do you still love them?
• What if this person becomes really fat, or is in an accident and has burn marks all over their face and body, so you think you’ll still love them, or find them repulsive?

How did you do? Were your answers mostly “Yes, I’ll totally still love him/her!”? … Or more like “Um… er.. maybe not…” … Most people would probably answer “Maybe not”… and if you did… well hey, I guess that means you don’t really love this person, but that’s okay, at least you know. 

And if you actually answered “Yes” to most (or even all) the questions – then it’s probably pretty safe to say you really love this person. Awesome. The world needs more people like you. 

But wait, there’s more… here’s a bonus question!

• Imagine this person tells you they love you, but they also love someone else… how does that make you feel? Happy or upset?

This one is interesting, because the conventional “wisdom” generally seems to be that it’s good if you’re the only person he/she loves, and bad if there’s someone else… which is weird if you consider love to be a good thing. Love is a good thing, right? Love is never bad, right? So then how does it make any sense at all that it’d be a bad thing if this person loves MORE THAN ONE PERSON? Makes no sense to me… so then, if you’re happy for the person because they love more people, awesome – I’d say that’s a pretty good sign that you love this person and care about their well-being. If, on the other hand, the idea of them loving another human being besides you makes you upset or jealous or feel threatened in some way, I’d say you’re really more concerned about yourself and probably have some insecurity issues you might want to look into.