@liz£h · 7 answers · 4y

How can you tell if someone really loves you or just settling with you?

Haha, this question is based on a groundshattering misunderstanding I think. Love is a thing that has phases, development, degradation and enhancement. It isn't a fixed item. Settling can turn into hot desire, hot desire can tun into love, love can change to settling and friendship, just sharing a flat can be a base for a serious life long love. Even hatred can change to love and vice versa. You can have lovely sex and a lovely way of treating each other without love and just love without any sort of presence of the loved person. And it isn't exclusive either. Not only can you love each person differently, you can love more than one person the same time too. Most cultures do not allow to admit this, but it is present everywhere. We tend to resort to call some love family, some love friendship, some love deep, some love shallow, some love is just a business, other types are called pleasure, or just 'nice evening', But when you listen to yourself and try to be more honest than your culture wants you to be, then you may find out that love is your personal state of maintaining your attachment to other persons including poetical, physical and any other sort of love feeling you are capable of. We too often regard love as something we share and which is like an atom not splittable among different parties. Which is nonsense. Love is a gift we give. We never know how that gift is received, but when that gift is accepted it makes us happy and sometimes we receive the same gift from the other person. And to our utter amazement we might be able to give the gift but cannot accept it from the same person we gave it to. Or the gift is rejected. Or we wish we would be able to give it but cannot. And sometimes the gift is big with bells whistles and golden wrappings. But package and content will not stay the same. That gift changes over time and so do we. That is what makes this gift so rare, fragile and valuable. Rather than spoiling it with questions like: will it last forever? We should enjoy it better as long as we get it. But beware, some people send poisoned gifts. Love combined with a prison cage made of fake golden strings. Some people mistake love with owning, possession, slavery. They never knew it is a gift. For them it is an obligation, a burden, a heavy golden treasure to breed upon in misery, pain and vanity. And they mistake master and servant with lovers. You can therefore tell if someone really loves you by the freedom that you get while accepting the gift of love. Attachment is not wearing chains.

Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting

*italic text* for italic text

**bold text** for bold text

[link](https://example.com) for link