Do you NOT know what being "in love" feels like

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Curious if there are other folks who may have a problem recognizing the feeling of being "in love". Potentially recognizing the missing emotional attachment only after the relationship is over.

Do you rationalize the feeling(s)? Fake it? Read romantic posts and potentially copy verbatim?

Or am I simply mistaken and everyone knows what it's like to feel love and to be in love?

well, is it love, or is it limerence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence

Love is such a broad term.

I know how the feeling of loving someone but I've never experienced this term most people use when they're in romantic relationships called "being in love".

I have to wonder if some of the people I thought I loved was only limerence,
in the end I always seem to end up getting hurt by these people.

I've never been in love or had any kind of relationship like that so no, I do not know what if feels like.

It is an awful mental illness that is best avoided if at all possible.

Only once for real I think, but other times I think I managed to convince myself I was out of necessity.

I know what it feels like to have a crush on someone! But I don't think I've gotten to the point of love yet.

I have trouble sorting out romantic feelings and have thought deeply about what I think love is since I was a teenager. Describing what I think it is utterly confounding. It feels like trying to describe a perfect sphere in a language I'm not good at speaking. Then of course, I wonder if that sphere is the same thing other people mean when they say love.

what a great link
all this time i was limerating instead of loving? gosh, what a mind-blower

Maybe you could write a limerick about it. No wait, I'll do it.

A Limerick About Limerance

There once was a guy name of Blabby
who thought that he loved very madly
imagine the surprise
when before his eyes
it turned out it was only strong fancy

That's terrible. I'm still posting it. Otherwise it'd be a minute of my life wasted.


I do know what love is and have felt it several times.

Is it about chemicals? I don´t know but I can recognize it for sure. When I was in love I had this unusually good feeling running through me and the feeling was quite strong. Couldn´t miss that. I also had a strong sense of care for the other person. It felt like exitement and everything was brighter and happier.

Well it is like this song:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfuBREMXxts[/youtube]

I seriously doubt if love or limerence is any more than happiness.
All posts have been made that refer to a feeling of happiness, yet none are refuting my belief.
I doubt I can feel any more than happy about someone.
But I can write very vaguely or otherwise poetically about feelings I have never experienced.
The irony is, that actually experiencing that makes me unable to, because I fail to be concrete and can only be vague as all poetry is.

I think that up until I was 21 or so I had limerence for all of my (few) close
friends regardless of gender which is the original basis for believing myself
to have natural bi sexual orientation. When I was 5 or 6 years old and my
first best friend moved away, I recall saying "My (*) will go crazy without you".
* = A made-up name for an imaginary machine

When I was 14, the real manifestation of that machine was shut down for
the duration of the hospitalization of a close friend. I was in an autistic
school program and others were aware of the machine and knew what
it was for and even how to use it. That was near the end of the period
where I imported imaginary machines into reality and the beginning of
using that self-taught skill to invent things that were useful. On the day
that my friend was hospitalized I invented another machine that spoke with a
human voice (not Speak and Spell voice), and didn't know what had
happened to my friend until I tried to call him to tell him about it.

The particular machine is almost beyond explanation, and its basis
and purpose is related to a naive theory of why people love each
other. If I could sum it up in one peculiar sentence:
Clark Kent walks into a phone box and becomes Superman by
Turning On the Power of Love. Lois Lane doesn't love Clark.
So "the machine" is inspired by qualitative limerence
and meant to be a generator of a human physical attraction force,
believing that I alone was missing a natural one.

It took me too long to figure out that Clark Kent not only looked unattractive,
but was also intentionally suppressing his attractiveness. I also didn't notice
that Lois Lane was indifferent to Clark. I didn't understand the secret identity
concept as anything more than costume. I am speaking of the 1940s and 1970s
television and movie Superman example. All I thought about why women
might love men is because they are strong, and I assumed that if they didn't
like me then I must be wimpy. And dumbbells didn't seem to help.

I haven't got a clue what love feels like. I know what affection feels like (uncertain whether this is limerence or not), and fondness. But romantic love? Never felt it.

I think it's one of those things that can't be explained by words, only by feelings.