Love — you are sung by poets. The greatest philosophers have tried to understand your essence for centuries. Psychologists are ready to stir up the very depths of the subconscious and dissect consciousness under a microscope, just to unravel your nature. Someone thinks that you are a gift from heaven, someone calls you art, for someone you are a disease, but for someone you simply do not exist.

But let’s leave philosophical categories for now, let’s return to the sinful earth, and try to understand what love is, and how it manifests itself.

How to understand — this is love, or just a habit?

Quite often you can hear that over time, any, even the most passionate relationship loses its novelty, and love gradually leaves, leaving behind, at best, affection and mutual respect, and at worst, just a habit of being together. There is, of course, a rational grain in this statement, but, perhaps, it is too categorical. Of course, after many years spent together, it is difficult to expect the same storm of passions from the relationship as in the first months of acquaintance. A person gets used to everything, both good and bad, and loses that novelty of sensations that was so dizzy at the beginning of the novel (by the way, if we talk about the biochemistry of the human body, then we get used to oxytocin, a substance that causes attachment and is responsible for good mood). However, years do not always destroy love. Often they translate it into a different quality: and from an ardent romantic attachment, a real deep feeling grows, albeit not so bright, but capable of warming our lives with its warmth for many years.

It is difficult to confuse this feeling with a habit, but the routine of everyday affairs or prolonged depression may well raise doubts about its authenticity. In order to understand whether this is love, just imagine how you would feel if one day you wake up to find that the one who walked with you through life has disappeared forever. If the answer is — well, thank God, as if reborn, then maybe you really are connected by something that has little to do with love. However, it is better not to cut in the heat of the moment, but to visit a family psychologist — perhaps not everything is lost yet.

How to understand that this is true love?

Above, we talked about «experienced» couples, but the question of the nature of the flared feelings sometimes visits those whose relationship began recently. In this case, this is just a wake-up call — since such doubts very rarely arise in a relationship at an early stage. It’s just that the period of romantic love leaves no time for soul-searching. Although, it is also possible that the more you know a person, the more you begin to love him. One way or another, it is worth waiting for further developments, and if doubts only intensify, most likely this is not the person you need.