Grow Old With Me

 Is it love? Or is it just the initial and temporary rush of romance?
Is this real? Or is this just another heartbreak waiting to happen?

Here are two lists to help tell the difference between true love and superficial feelings based on an infatuation or obsession, also known as limerence.
(And to be clear, it looks like even healthy relationships can exhibit some of the characteristics of limerence. The real indicator of limerence is a consistent, ongoing, and most likely painful or dissatisfying pattern that results in escalating negative relationship consequences.)

LIMERENCE:
• You depend on the relationship for self-esteem.
• You take much more from the relationship than you are willing to give.
• You give much more from the relationship than you get.
• The relationship drains your emotional, psychological, and physical energies. You are jealous of the other persons’ separate activities.
• You can only think of the other person.
• You are afraid that the other person could lose interest in you.
• You feel a deep need, clinging, or grasping for your partner.
• You feel an obsessed or constant preoccupation with your partner.
• You need your partner or your relationship to get away from your problems.
• Your partner or your relationship make you feel whole or fixed.
• You are much more strongly attracted to the intense experience of “falling in love” than you are to the peaceful intimacy of healthy relationships.
• You are addicted to the rush of first romance.
• You are desperate to please your partner and fearful of their unhappiness.
• You participate in activities that don’t interest you or go against your personal values in order to keep or please your partner.
• You are willing to give up important interests, beliefs, or friendships to maximize time in the relationship or to please your partner.
• You rely on your partner or relationship to provide you with the emotional and life stability you lack.

REAL/TRUE LOVE:
• Trust, honesty, love, and respect bind you together.
• Each of you accepts the fact that neither is perfect.
• The relationship still gives both you and your partner enough energy to devote to other aspects of life. Each of you continues to grow as independent human beings.
• You regard you and your partner as individuals, separately apart from each other.
• Each of you feel a responsibility to each other’s well-being.
• Both of you experience the joy in giving as well as in receiving.
• Each of you understand and accept the world and realities of the other one.
• You both recognize and honor your own needs and those of your partner.
• The “rush” of first love has developed into a sustainable and intimate attachment.
• You are strongly attracted to the peaceful intimacy of healthy relationships.
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COMMITTED LOVE:
This type of love is a much different story. It doesn’t sparkle but for a moment here and there. Our culture does a terrible job of ever showing this except for fleeting moments like “cute old people holding hands” or in the rare example of a healthy couple on television like the Taylor’s on Friday Night Lights (my personal favorite - not as a TV series, but instead as a demonstration and study of healthy relationship dynamics in popular culture). Maybe we don’t see it because there isn’t much to see. Committed love is about sharing normal life together. It is about being supportive, affectionate, kind, caring, committed, responsive, and loyal. I have read that this is the stuff of the healthiest long-term couples, and can be thought of as “standing in love”.  I am trying to do it this way this time.  Before, I had no experience.  Love was love, or so I thought.  Now I have some experience under my belt, and as far as I can tell there's no excuse for continuing negative relationship patterns, especially after we become aware of the differences in all these aspects of "love." 
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Robert Johnson, a Jungian writer, calls this “stirring the oatmeal” love, and describes it as: “…a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To ‘stir the oatmeal’ means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty in simple ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment or an extraordinary intensity in everything. Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Gandhi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary.”