How Do You Know You Really Love Someone?

Humans are incredibly emotional animals. When we start developing a crush on another person, it’s really easy to get in way over our heads and start interpreting the intense feelings we are experiencing as true love. “They’re the one,” we think to ourselves.

We start to feel all sorts of powerful desires. We start to miss them after only a short time of being away; we get anxious when they don’t respond to a text message right away, and even worse when it drags on the whole day; we interpret every action they take in terms of how much they like us back…and so it goes on.

Acting on that early rush can easily cloud our judgement and push us into decisions we later regret. While there is no diagnostic checklist that can prove what the future holds, reflecting on a few practical emotional and behavioural patterns can help you tell the difference between a passing infatuation and a more grounded, lasting love.

Ways to know that it’s real love

1. You care about how they feel, not just what they think

It’s natural to always have on your mind what your new interest thinks of what you say and do. You will undoubtedly value their opinion, and receiving positive affirmation and feedback on just about anything from them can feel truly electrifying. It could be something absolutely mundane like they compliment you on your toast in the morning, to something more meaningful like when they say they like your smile.

The difference between infatuation and love often shows up in where your attention goes next. When you are purely infatuated, it is easy to fixate on winning their approval over fairly trivial things while barely registering what is actually going on in their life. When the feeling runs deeper, you care about their genuine wellbeing – such as noticing they are exhausted after a brutal week at work and offering a quiet night in, rather than worrying about whether you seemed entertaining enough.

2. The relationship feels natural and shared

A grounded connection does not mean you will never have a misunderstanding, nor does it mean your partner can magically read your mind before you have finished a sentence. Expecting someone to read between the lines every time is usually a recipe for frustration. What changes when you are genuinely falling for the right person is that communication feels safe: you do not feel as though you are walking on eggshells, and you can be yourself without performing.

There’s a more physical dimension to this, as well. When it’s love, you never feel like you are putting in all the effort and strain to make things work. For instance, you aren’t the one who has to plan activities, make arrangements, choose restaurants for dinner and even order the food there. Your new partner will also be invested in making life easier for you, creating that sense of partnership, of doing things as a team. That’s real love.

3. The butterflies settle into warmth

Getting butterflies in your stomach is one of the hardest signs to read accurately because it’s a feature of both infatuation and real love. The “love butterflies” are the ones that seem to endure much longer than those of an infatuation, which will tend to diminish, possibly devolving into pure sexual or lustful excitement for someone you are excited to sleep with on occasion. That’s not love, though.

You’ll know it’s love when you just feel that sense of nervousness before seeing them, a sense that melts into “warm and fuzzy” feelings when you actually connect with them. The nervousness of the early days evolves into more of a sense of lasting excitement because you just want to see them, talk to them, hug them or kiss them and feel that same affection in return. These are the “love butterflies.”

4. Your new interest is constantly on your mind

Never being able to truly shed the image of your new partner from your mind is another classic sign that you are falling for someone in a very genuine way. Once again, this is a feeling that transcends pure lust. It’s also not referring to you actively thinking about that person 24/7. It’s more the case that no matter what you’re doing, who you’re with or what you’re seeing around you, you suddenly find ways to connect that person to it.

You might be always thinking, “oh, he’d love this,” or “I wish she was here with me seeing this right now.” Whenever you think to share new information, this person will be the first person you think of, and you will often regard media content, funny situations in life and other things always in the context of how you want to share it with that special someone.

5. You want to bring them into your real world

You’ve likely heard of the common idea of a love so strong and real that you want “to shout it from the rooftops.” This refers to that feeling you get when you just want to share your joy with everyone around you. It doesn’t always happen in romantic relationships, but it’s certainly a prominent feature of the minds of two people in love.

If you are in a relatively new relationship and wondering whether what you feel is love or a passing fancy, ask yourself a simple question: “Would I like this person to meet my friends and family?” Plenty of people take their time with introductions because of complicated family dynamics or a sensible wish for early privacy. However, if you have a close circle and still feel a lingering reluctance to let your worlds overlap, part of you may already sense that the connection is not built for the long haul.

If the answer is yes, then on a deeper level you also know that this is someone you want to invest in emotionally. Integrating that person into your circle of friends and family is a clear sign that you want that person to be around for a long time.

6. You feel calmer and more optimistic day to day

When a relationship is good for you, it tends to lift your everyday mood rather than keeping you in a state of nervous suspense. You might notice that you have a bit more patience for minor irritations, that you are less easily agitated after a long commute, or simply that you are laughing more often than you used to.

7. You bring out a healthier side in each other

A new relationship is not a substitute for therapy, and no partner can single-handedly cure deep-seated shame or depression. Even so, feeling genuinely cared for often gives you a fresh nudge to look after yourself properly.

When you are with someone who values you, it becomes much easier to put effort into your own routine – whether that means cooking decent meals again, getting back into a hobby you had sidelined, or handling day-to-day responsibilities with a clearer head. Encouraging healthy habits in one another is a quiet, practical sign of a solid bond.

8. You start to picture the longer term

Finally, a good way to know whether what you’re feeling is real love or just an infatuation is to reflect on the long term. Do you find yourself picturing a future with this person? It might not be a wedding that’s immediately popped into your head, but it could be taking trips together, plans for a future holiday or even just summer next year. If you can picture months or years into the future with someone and get excited about that, then love might just be in your heart.

Look for the love, skip past the infatuation

You can’t just will something to be true love, unfortunately, no matter how hard you try. True love is a force of nature that is both the most powerful sense of ecstasy but also a tremendous potential source of pain if you get it wrong or try to make it do things that it shouldn’t.

Sometimes what you feel with an exciting new person is mainly early passion. In a 1998 study of 197 courting and young married couples, researchers Susan Sprecher and Pamela C. Regan found that passionate love was more sexualised than companionate love and tended to decline over time, whereas companionate love – built on deeper warmth and friendship – was more strongly tied to relationship satisfaction[1]. Similarly, a 2015 study of heterosexual women by Gül Günaydın and Jordan E. DeLong observed that women reporting higher passionate love tended to represent their male partner’s face as more attractive and trustworthy than those reporting lower passionate love[2].

That research does not hand us a neat rule for predicting which relationships will last, nor does it mean that noticing a partner’s flaws proves your love has matured. Still, as you get to know someone, it helps to notice whether you can see them realistically – including their limitations and annoying habits – while still treating them with care and respect. Use the patterns below as a prompt for reflection rather than a rigid test, and give the connection time to show what it is truly made of.

Ready to find love?

If you haven’t met someone who sparks those deeper feelings yet, it may simply be a matter of looking in the right places. When you are ready to meet new people, you can explore our comparison of dating sites to see which platform suits you best.

If you are specifically looking for practical advice on approaching someone and building a connection from scratch, you can also read our guide on how to get a girlfriend.