Love - can we feel it or are we just faking it?

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Being an AS male, I have had a discussion regarding true feelings of love, with my girlfriend.

In my view, love is when you wish to do something for another person, that do not directly benefit yourself. Love is when you feel that your life is without meaning, without her in it! Love is picking up her daugther from school, taking care of her emotional needs, while forgetting to put the laundry away instead, because she is more important than laundry!

In her view, it is making me a good meal, that I enjoy. Baking me a cake, that I enjoy. Watching an action movie with me. Taking down the laundry, so she do not needs to, when she get home late from work, tired.

The real problem here is, if we want to make somebody feel loved, how do we show it? Or is the only way to do what they want us to do, to make them feel loved. To complicated for my AS brain

In short, how do you define love and how do you show it?

/AG

Gary Chapman has come up with this concept of the Five Love Languages, or ways that people express and understand love. I think it's kind of interesting. His five categories are: gift-giving, words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, and physical affection. According to him, in order to make someone feel the most loved, you figure out what their primary love languages are and then express your love to them in those languages. At least, that's my understanding.

I feel love and I feel loved.

I try to show my bf that I care by giving a back massage when he looks stressed or finding something cool for him (an odd bookmark, his favorite authors new book or something else that's interesting). He shows it by helping me in the kitchen when it's my day and I'm tired, and some other things that, while are not intimate, feel to personal to me for to share.

I love autism and wrong planet.

I do things like make my partners food, bring them meals, make them cards and gifts, rub backs etc.

i love my boyfriend.
i'd trust him with my life.

It takes time for me to show my love. I can't really define love though, I just know when I'm in it. It's more than just a feeling.

I think the closest we can come to love is finding a mutual ground with someone, sharing traits such as respect, loyalty, trust and just selflessly giving and being devoted to one another in a relationship. I think that's what truly defines love and to what extent those traits are shown rather than basing the strength of a relationship on physical intimacy and romantic gestures.

Sigh*

I have often wondered the same thing. The relationships I have been in always get to a certain critical point and fail. The closer I get to someone the more awkward and lost I become. I have found that I cannot connect with anyone to a point required of a serious relationship and the despair this has caused has been on orders of magnitude far greater than I would of ever imagined.

It wasn't that big of an issue until I met someone that I actually did desire to be closer to, and my efforts to achieve this end were all but futile - leaving me with a feeling of emptiness I can't even begin to address

Even the primitive stages of intimacy scare me to death. A problem I have regretably addressed with substances

At the end of the day people and what motivates them to behave in the way they do and carry out they actions they display, utterly confounds me

I wonder if the title of this thread being unrelated to the opening post is perhaps an attempt to draw more people in with an inflammatory question or an experiment to see who responds to thread titles without reading OPs.

If we are 'faking it' I'd say the term love needs redefinition to rectify the problem - ie. a lot of us, perhaps most of us, have no shortage of emotional bond to those close to us as well as those who we're bringing close to us. The difference between us and NT's, by nature, is that our social wiring changes the economy of what behaviorally works for us and what doesn't, hence we won't show it in the same ways as we can't - the way it comes out we've often found out the hard way that we really can't go on instinct or at least need years of heavily modifying instinct to make it fit the broader paradigm.