"falling in love" vs "growing in love"

Shaya

Shaya

New member
I've come to believe "falling in love" and "growing in love" are two different things and that the english language uses the word "love" in two different ways. The word "love" describes a different emotion in each of these contexts.

When we "fall in love", I believe we are head over heels and will go out of our way to do things for the other person, but a lot of what we envisage that person to be is a fantasy. We often feel like we know them really well, like a "soul mate", even after only meeting them a few times. Often, after dating for a few months or years, we may no longer think we know them at all - which obviously contradicts the fact that we thought we knew them initially. I think this is because when we are "falling in love", we are projecting a fantasy of ours onto the person we "love". We don't really know them, but we think we do. It's a fantasy. A projection clouded by a hormone bucket of biased emotions. I feel that our need to do things to please them actually revolve around our own pleasure and our own attainment of the fantasy. We may make large sacrifices, but we do it because we feel better at the end, be it because of their smile, their affection or just an additional "feel good" of endorphin rush that adds to the "falling in love feelings".

When we "grow in love", I believe this happens later in the relationship, years down the track. As the endorphins and euphoria wear off, we start to really understand the strengths and weaknesses of our significant other. We see how they act under pressure, or when there is no reward or coercion. We see "the real" them - both the good and the bad. The fantasy is shed for reality. The things we do and the sacrifices we make for them at this stage, are truly for them, and no longer revolve around our own pleasure. Many of the things we do for loved ones at this stage are actual sacrifices, and sometimes very difficult.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts. The english language has used the word "love" in two different contexts and we should have a different word for each situation. In poly, the first stage of love, or "falling in love" is called NRE. In other contexts, the word limerance is sometimes used for the first stage of love.

In summary, I feel that "falling in love" and "growing in love" actually describe 2 different emotions, caused within our body by different hormones or chemicals and occur along different timeframes. "Falling in love" is a fantasy projection of our ideal partner onto someone we feel may be a soul mate but whom we do not know as well as a person we have "grown in love" with. Our reasons for doing things for people we are "falling in love" with and people we have "grown in love" with also seem to be slightly different. The english language seems to have used the word "love" to refer to 2 different biological emotions. If english had used 2 different words to refer to these 2 different emotions, I suspect we would be thinking about things differently.
 
I prefer the term NRE over the phrase "falling in love" because I think it's much more accurate. NRE is not love. It's hormones and sexual energy...and possibilities. And some fantasy and projection. Love is more selfless and NRE is more selfish.
 
That has not been my experience, but different people are different.

What you are describing reminds me more of "internet love", people who meet on the internet and fall in love before ever meeting in person. That often involves the projection of fantasies onto another person.

For me, NRE goes hand in hand with falling in love. It is the falling in love that causes NRE. OTOH, "growing in love" is something that might occur between two friends. It sort of sneaks up on you.
 
I can see this, but it makes me wonder if you can start off falling in love with someone and then later grow in love with the same person? I think it is different stages of the same emotion.
 
I've been thinking about this post since reading it last night, and while at first I didn't like the definitions put in the op, the more I think about it... Maybe.

I consider myself to have been "in love" 5 times in my life.

1 - middle school love - very much a "grew" thing. We were friends, he was into me, I wasn't in to him, then one day BAM! I realized I actually really did care for him in a more than friends way and we began to date. Soon after professing love, etc. We were young (like, seriously. 13-ish), so it didn't last but to this day Hubby says that if situations had been different I would have married this guy. We're still in touch occasionally.

2 - Hubby - another "grew" love - We were friends, he was into me, I wasn't in to him, then one day BAM! lol Familiar, right? I was still only 14 when we met, 15 when we actually started dating. We're married and quite happy.

3 - A woman I met while transitioning from swinger to open/poly - a "fall" - a disaster. I still found myself tearing up while thinking of her the other day. We had great sex, great conversations, great cuddles. She wanted to be in the closet. I couldn't be in the closet. Then I moved away and cut her off because I couldn't do the whole pining thing constantly. Was the falling in love rapidly LESS love-like than the two stable loves I'd felt? No. It just wasn't going to be feasible long term.

4 - a guy I met on OKC (Doomed in my blog) - another "fall" - It was intense. It was deep. It was insanely real. Due to other circumstances, however, (mainly his primary relationship at the time) it was also not feasible. I cried, I mourned, I moved on. We're also still in contact occasionally but have both changed enough over the last couple of years that another go at it isn't even on our radar, even though the reason we split is no longer an issue.

5 - Boy - a "grow" - I struggled where to put him in the line-up, honestly. I think I "fell" for him then rationalized myself out of it when he was going through some stuff, and I opted to back off for a while - during that break is when I met Doomed. Then we started hanging out as friends and before I knew it were "in love" and happily relationship-ing without planning it.

So, yeah. Falling in love seems to always involve short, unrealistic relationships while growing the love seems to be sustainable. I'm sure it's a "YMMV" situation, though.
 
Maybe there are as many kinds of love as there are people to feel it.

I used to think that I was doomed to experience only unreciprocated passion. That any time I felt a wild blaze of intensity for someone, they would never love me back. I wanted to be ok with that, if only my partners would understand that it's no trap. It did not mean anything had to happen and it was ok if they did not love me in return. I have felt that intense stuff for only a few of my previous partners. It tended to blaze up after our first sexual encounter, whether I knew them well or not. Worm King was a great example, maybe the defining example, of that. I had a lot of passion for him. He didn't return it, and I am pretty sure that the feeling that I would push for more than he wanted to give, was why he flaked out and drifted further and further away...until all that's left are "likes" on Facebook statuses and the very rare middle of the night drunk message, simply asking how I am doing or something.

On the flipside, in my youth there were plenty of my young partners who seemed in deep states of puppy love for me, but I didn't feel very strongly about them, and eventually tired of their company. My ex husband, Old Wolf, was a good example of someone who felt great passion and intensity for me, but I could not return it. I thought that was the best I could do, at least I was reasonably in control of the situation, and I went with it for a long time. He remained passionate for me until the day I broke his heart, and then some. He looked at me like a dog looks at the last bite of your steak as you put it into your mouth, for YEARS.

I did not think that anyone in my poly quad had that intensity for me, I thought we all had the same sort of warm, but...safe...affections for one another. Friendship, respect, intimacy, but nothing that consumes the soul. Maybe I was wrong. I cannot see into their hearts to know.

But with Zen, I have never been so in love, but it didn't happen right away. I was at the same point of warm, but not blazing, as I was with the quad...until a good seven months into the sexual part of our relationship, and a good nine months after we met. Suddenly it crept up on me and he was my EVERYTHING. And we're still going strong, feeling all intense and full of joy for each other. We can't keep our eyes and our hands off one another. It has been this way for about a year now.

Supposedly limerance, or NRE, is something that fades. I have never experienced that. In my experience, either the non-limerant partner, the less "in love" one, has cut it off, resulting in all sorts of tears and heartbreak...or it just goes on and on. I have not had the luxury of time to fall OUT of love. So I guess we will see how things go with Zen and me.
 
I sometimes wonder if language restricts us in our thinking. Consider a (hypothetical) language where the words "eat" and "drink" are replaced with the word "consume". In addition, this hypothetical language has no word to distinguish "food" and "beverage". In this language, anything you put in your mouth would be consumed. If there is no distinction between solids and liquids, people who speak this language would be hard pressed to understand the distinction between eating and drinking. In particular, they may struggle to classify things like slushies as solids or liquids and therefore get confused whether you eat or drink a slushie. People who speak this language may be able to understand that there is a difference between eating and drinking on an intellectual level due to the amount of chewing you do, but may fail to see the need for a distinction in the words and be quite happy with "consume", saying it's all part of the same spectrum.

In relation to the word love, my opening post was wondering if our use of the mystical word "love" in English to cover a whole range of different meanings, from romantic liaisons, to one-sided unrequitted romance, to stalker-type love, to internet-love... our broad use of the word "love" made me wonder if we are blind to its subtleties. In particular, "falling in love" and "growing in love" seem to be two very different forms of love for me.

The distinction is important. On these forums, we see so many people in NRE throw away their old relationships, believing they have found real love when contrasting the excitement of their new relationship to the flaws of their old stale relationship. There can be many factors that contribute to a separation, but one factor that I feel flies under the radar, is when we compare apples to oranges by calling it all love.
 
Shaya said:
I sometimes wonder if language restricts us in our thinking. Consider a (hypothetical) language where the words "eat" and "drink" are replaced with the word "consume". In addition, this hypothetical language has no word to distinguish "food" and "beverage". In this language, anything you put in your mouth would be consumed. If there is no distinction between solids and liquids, people who speak this language would be hard pressed to understand the distinction between eating and drinking. In particular, they may struggle to classify things like slushies as solids or liquids and therefore get confused whether you eat or drink a slushie. People who speak this language may be able to understand that there is a difference between eating and drinking on an intellectual level due to the amount of chewing you do, but may fail to see the need for a distinction in the words and be quite happy with "consume", saying it's all part of the same spectrum.

In relation to the word love, my opening post was wondering if our use of the mystical word "love" in English to cover a whole range of different meanings, from romantic liaisons, to one-sided unrequitted romance, to stalker-type love, to internet-love... our broad use of the word "love" made me wonder if we are blind to its subtleties. In particular, "falling in love" and "growing in love" seem to be two very different forms of love for me.

The distinction is important. On these forums, we see so many people in NRE throw away their old relationships, believing they have found real love when contrasting the excitement of their new relationship to the flaws of their old stale relationship. There can be many factors that contribute to a separation, but one factor that I feel flies under the radar, is when we compare apples to oranges by calling it all love.
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Interesting!

Though I think I would resist, perhaps, a desire to make different words. I actually get annoyed with the...diminishment...of the significance of NRE or limerance, as "love."

But not only do we have one word we use for so many things, but it means completely different things to different people...how confusing can we be?!

So I said "I love you" to the Worm King, about two weeks into our casual fuckbuddies thing, which we had never bothered to label or define, and which he was completely resistant to any attempts at such, until he finally got mad and demanded to know if I had a problem with "just being his sex girl." Whoa. Isn't that exciting! Well all I meant when I said, "I love you" to him was that I thought he was super duper neat and I sure enjoyed our time together, and my senses most thoroughly approved of the sight, sound, smell, touch and taste of him, and I was just sorta generally delighted with his role in my life, precisely as it was. What I think he must have heard, was something closer to, "I want to move in with you, demand that you throw away all of your stuff and stop playing video games, make some babies, and get fat on your cooking. WHERE IS MY DIAMOND??" Or...something?

Sure as all heck wasn't what I said. The proper response to what I said, would have been, "Thank you." Instead he said something along the lines of, "*sigh*....You need to understand, that although I live alone...I am not a lonely man..." Um. Right.

But I do not wish to stop using the word. I like the idea of a world with more love in it, and not less. I will tell my friends that I love them (and it's funny, they never seem to get scared by it, only sex partners do...hm!) and I tell my family that I love them, and I tell my lovers that I love them...and what I actually am feeling is sometimes different.

Old Wolf, my ex, I loved even though I did not LIKE him. I loved him like a family member who had been around through thick and thin, and helped me through many a hardship, but whose Thanksgiving visits are tense and I would breathe a sigh of relief if he'd just take his drunk political ravings elsewhere, if you please.

Worm King, I barely knew, but felt intense things. You could say it was lust, or limerance. And that is probably pretty right. Felt like a sort of drug addiction, like a kind of insanity, at times. It was like a sudden explosion of fire that burned off my eyebrows.

Analyst, Fire and Hefe... It was a shining true friendship, which I hope will last our lifetimes. It was deep and family-like. It was occasionally lusty, but not very intensely for me. Mostly, my desires for them were desires to show affection in physical ways, not fiercely driving hungers. It felt healthier. I did not lie in bed weeping that they didn't text me for three whole days. No such insanity beset me. A golden afternoon, compared to a bonfire.

Zen has many of the best elements of Worm King and the Quad. The familial part would take longer to grow, if it does. But when I have said "I love you" to him, it has come with different feeling from the beginning, to a year ago, to now. It meant "Yeah, you're pretty cool, let's see where this goes" and later "Wow, this is really special, I want to be with you all the time and your ears are the cutest shape and you smell SO nice..." and now "I can't wait to move in together, and I really want to go to the beach next year if we can afford it, and I center my emotional state by thinking about your eyes."

But hey...see...I am of British heritage mostly, so "I use ten words when two would do, honestly." Nothing has to be confusing if one is willing to explain, or to LISTEN.
 
Shaya said:
I sometimes wonder if language restricts us in our thinking. Consider a (hypothetical) language where the words "eat" and "drink" are replaced with the word "consume". In addition, this hypothetical language has no word to distinguish "food" and "beverage". In this language, anything you put in your mouth would be consumed. If there is no distinction between solids and liquids, people who speak this language would be hard pressed to understand the distinction between eating and drinking. In particular, they may struggle to classify things like slushies as solids or liquids and therefore get confused whether you eat or drink a slushie. People who speak this language may be able to understand that there is a difference between eating and drinking on an intellectual level due to the amount of chewing you do, but may fail to see the need for a distinction in the words and be quite happy with "consume", saying it's all part of the same spectrum.

In relation to the word love, my opening post was wondering if our use of the mystical word "love" in English to cover a whole range of different meanings, from romantic liaisons, to one-sided unrequitted romance, to stalker-type love, to internet-love... our broad use of the word "love" made me wonder if we are blind to its subtleties. In particular, "falling in love" and "growing in love" seem to be two very different forms of love for me.

The distinction is important. On these forums, we see so many people in NRE throw away their old relationships, believing they have found real love when contrasting the excitement of their new relationship to the flaws of their old stale relationship. There can be many factors that contribute to a separation, but one factor that I feel flies under the radar, is when we compare apples to oranges by calling it all love.
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I am falling in love with you, Mr. Geeky. It is so much the kind of stuff I contemplate at times (though not many other threads you started, so this is a one thread love so far)

Frankly, I've never been in love without being intoxicated on it. Am not sure if it is a behavioral trait or what, but I don't stop being intoxicated on it for a long long time either - usually by the time the partner has started seeing it as "daily blah" - which is usually the reason for me to break up. Stopping working to keep an intimate relationship in the "interested and happy" zone is the ultimate relationship sin for me. Occasional dry spells, understood. If you turn into the Sahara, I'm a cactus.

Sometimes it sucks. Like I can't think of any of my long term relationships without feeling a twinge of "something". And they have already "pickled" or even "embalmed" their next relationship by then.

It is something I appreciate about Spexy - he is as keen as me on keeping our relationship in that "very much alive" zone and works to keep me happy every single day (ok, a gal is allowed some hormonal feelingful exaggerations).

Almost 3 years. So what? My favorite person here!

And we learn some new way daily. This morning I ordered a bunch of roses to be delivered to his home "because why not". I feel pretty grateful he was delighted with them instead of reminding me of how often I've said flowers look better on plants than in vases - I'd honestly forgotten in my quest to send him something PHYSICAL :eek: :p
 
Is what you're describing the same phenomenon as loving a spouse or partner BUT not being " in love " with them ?

I've also thought word love is like snow in the English language. The Eskimo's have something like 13 or 17 different words for the various different snow conditions. I don't think love has quite that many subgrouping but one seems lacking.
 
As an aside, eskimo words for snow is a myth or misnomer. My understanding is that eskimos use compound words without the hyphen and can create virtually unlimited number of "new words". For example, white-snow becomes whitesnow, snow-ball becomes snowball, falling snow becomes fallingsnow (totally inventing examples here). The myth implies that there are subtleties and variations in snow that eskimos can see and appreciate that we don't, and while there may be some truth there, the larger truth to their many words for snow can be put down to a difference in their linguistics due to compounding of words.

In summary, we're using our English definition of word and applying it to a foreign language to define their method of compounding words as one word, whereas we would consider the equivalent in our language ("white snow", "falling snow", "snow storm", etc) to be two words.
 
But back to "love". World wide life expectancy in 1900 was 31 years of age. I imagine a fair number of people who lived shorter than 31 years of age would only have had the chance to do a very limited version of serial monogamy. Although we appreciate a difference in meaning between lust and love, I can imagine a very poor country with a short life expectancy, poor literacy and a different language to potentially not be able to differentiate between the two emotions.
 
What I find so weird about that, is in going through my Ancestry.com genealogy, I found so many ancestors who lived very long lifespans during times when supposedly the life expectancy was much lower. Some of them had insane numbers of kids, and multiple spouses. Infant/child mortality was much higher too, but still I was surprised at just how long some of those folks lived. And my family was not generally very rich or anything. Lucky, I guess.

I wish that more of them left behind their life stories, more pictures and writings. My ex focuses on trying to leave a house or money behind for his kids and gives me a hard time for not having a property or accumulated wealth, asking me what I plan to leave behind for them. I want to leave stories. I might write an actual book one day, if only to be able to leave it for my descendants to read. I would dearly love to hear every scandalous (or not) detail of the lives of those who came before me...how they lived, and loved, and all.

One thing I find interesting was in listening to my Great Aunt talk about dating back when she was young. We are talking the 1940s. She had several boyfriends at once, but they didn't have sex. They DATED. You didn't commit to exclusivity until you were "going steady" or a precursor to engagement. You could feel emotional bonds with any number of people when you were single and dating. Casual love, rather than casual sex. Which is really more along the lines of how I want to be. Nowadays I hear about kids in MIDDLE SCHOOL getting all possessive of their supposed girlfriend or boyfriend, like even if he/she is not a sex partner, like they aren't allowed to even talk to or have close friends of the opposite gender or something. It's insane, to me.
 
That's interesting, Spork. History of love and beauty, history of sex and relationships, changes in societal thinking over time... i find that stuff interesting.
 
Falling in love isn't necessarily a bad thing ...
 
Falling in love ain't necessarily a bad thing, it can lead to growing in love, though if you listen to stories from other cultures, sometimes arranged marriages grow in love without falling in love first, though I'll admit I have difficulty conceptualizing this due to my bias and personal upbringing on the matter.

Falling in love ain't necessarily a bad thing, but the tumultuous emotions that come with it can be dangerous to existing relationships, especially if one has not had to handle multiple relationships before or if one subscribes to a monogamous model of love.
 
Now I'm thinking of "Fiddler on the Roof."
 
Shaya said:
I sometimes wonder if language restricts us in our thinking.
Click to expand...
Yep; that's an important principle of general semantics, & led to the concept of linguistic relativity.

It can be boiled down to simple concepts, though: The way my brain works shapes the words I use; the words I use channel the ways in which my brain can work.

Sloppy speech not only indicates sloppy thinking, but encourages it to persist & indeed strengthen.

Korzybski proposed what's been called "eliminating the 'is' function" in the English language, calling it E-Prime. Moderately hardcore stuff, but even a little effort can be enlightening, giving the user a powerful analytic & communication tool.
 
Growing in love is to wonder if someone will be there for you when you show your true self. To put all your cards on the table and have it all accepted. The bad as well as the good. The pain as well as the joy. For my part I even need the pain. At least from another. That's when you're really tested. "If you can't accept me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." Doesn't mean I'm going out of my way to be a prick, just that I'm human and aren't perfect. Furthermore people tend to make assumptions which lead to mistrust. I aren't having any of that.

To be IN love is to know someone is keeping you in mind. Hopefully when you're doing the same with them. To know that they're there unasked for, just because they taken that much of a liking to you. Only then do I know another is there for me, accepting the worst as well as the best and I can say not just the words but also why.

It's also important to know when NOT to say those words. Too soon have I spoken them once only for things to go badly. This was accepted and probably painful for another. It is because of this that I said the the words and the why only a few days after.

To be in love is to care to the point where someone makes you feel like yourself. Your real self. Sometimes people can conflict (poly and mono relationships for example), but what matters is that such things are accepted. For everything about you to matter to another. Because "their happiness". Which can involve unhappy and even bad things at times, but that just gives reason to get through those moments and tell yourselves "Ok, this happened. I don't resent them in any way for it and trust they have their reasons for it."
 
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