How to know if you’re ‘in love’

ONE of the most Googled questions worldwide is “what is love?” A psychologist reveals how you can really tell.

It’s normal to feel confused about whether you’re ‘in love’.

NEXT year, sometime in February, I’ll be walking down the very short aisle of a town hall in Melbourne to marry my sweetheart who is far from perfect. I may be even farther from perfect, but we do a pretty good job of loving each other despite our many flaws.

In our first year together, I would have told you I was in love. And even though I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, I would also have told you that he was faultless, and I’m pretty sure he would have said the same about me.

Now, five years down the track, we know better. Now we know much more about how truly broken, crazy and difficult we both are and so even though he has the most beautiful knees the world has ever known, some days love is something I have to practice, not something that just magically comes over me after looking at those knees.

If you’re wondering how to know if you’re really in love, you’re not alone. Am I in love? is one of the top three most Googled questions worldwide.

If you do a quick search on love, you’ll find that it’s not so different from plugging in a list of your mysterious symptoms hoping for a diagnosis; you’ll get a lot more answers than you bargained for.

But love isn’t a disease, a chronic condition or even a simple feeling. So you don’t have to look to Dr Google for your answer. You don’t have to measure your heartbeat, your happiness index or your sex drive. You don’t have to wait to fall or to be swept away or for the perfect knees to come along.

Because love is a choice, and that choice is all yours.

Many years ago, M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who wrote one of the most influential self-help books in recorded history, The Road Less Travelled, asked us to think of love as an action.

He said love is as love does.

If you can think of love as a verb instead of a noun, something you do rather than something you feel, you can free yourself from a passive position of letting crazy special feelings make your life plans. Instead, you can choose to care for someone, and you can choose to let someone into your life who’s able to care for you.

If you think of love as just a feeling, you invite a whole world of trouble through the door.

Because if love is just a feeling, and feelings come and go with the weather, the state of your emotional baggage and the way your special someone eats their eggs, then love is going to be a constant search for the next high for you, and relationships are going to be a never-ending rollercoaster ride you wish you’d never got on.

The other big problem with thinking about love as just a feeling, is that it lets you put up with all kinds of terrible behaviour in the name of love. It means you can say, but I love him/her!

Even though she uses the silent treatment for weeks on end/ he tracks me through my phone/ she’s mean to my kids. Looking at love as a feeling keeps you captive in abusive relationships and lets you off the hook when you neglect your beloved.

And the reality is that abuse and neglect are the opposite of love. Like the Death Star, they knock you out of the orbit of your better nature and block out the warmth of the loving sun.

So if you’re wondering if you’re really in love with someone, try asking yourself a different question. Ask yourself instead if you choose this person to love. If you’re willing to put the effort in to being loving towards them and if you’re willing to help them to love you.

When I stand in front of my man next February, with kids and friends and family, music and flowers, I won’t be there just because I’m regularly overcome with feelings of love for him. I’ll be there because I choose to love him, imperfectly and to the very best of my ability.

And of course, I’ll be thinking about those knees.

Zoe Krupka is a psychotherapist with experience in relationship counselling. Read Zoe’s blog here