how fast can you fall in love?

Isolt

My male friend told me lastnight that he knew he loved his girlfriend the same week he kissed her.

A colleague is seeing someone who told her he's falling for her after 3 dates.

My cousin just ended things with her fella because after 18 months he still wasn't 'in love'.

How soon have you known you loved someone? Is there a 'too soon' when it comes to declaring love? I think there are no rules with this kind of thing but would love to hear your opinions

The Big Red Button

It's very easy to say, with hindsight, that you knew from the second you laid eyes on a person that you were in love. IF it all worked out.

If your friend's relationship had ended after that first week, because she just wasn't into him, I wonder would he still be saying that he'd fallen in love with her in a week!!!

Catari Jaguar

"In love" is a bunch of chemicals (oxytocin, dopamine etc.) that cause infatuation and addiction, namely, feeling butterflies, being "crazy" in love, animal attraction, a person being on your mind all the time...

I guess if initially you don't have that infatuation with a person you might never have sexual/ romantic chemistry. Then again, maybe the more you get to know someone, the more of an attraction you would feel for their personality and quirks.

Films have us believe in "the one" and sparks and magic like it's the be all and end all of a relationship, but truth is, that fades. It's designed to. I would say there is a huge difference between love like I love him but it's as a brother/friend, love like "in love" puppy love or infatuation for a new relationship and then love love which is that companionship/trust/ loyalty, putting a person's needs ahead of your own and supporting them, it's content, quietly working in the background but you have your own independence/ sanity.

Lots of relationships break up when the "in love" chemicals burn away and that's a shame because when you see old couples together you realise that what they have is love and that's special.

I like this Dylan Moran quote

“Love in all its forms is very difficult ... to express. It changes, obviously. If you’re young, and you’re romantically in love with somebody, and often if you’ve just met somebody, its crazy! It’s completely overwhelming. You can’t think of anything else. You just want to rip out their spine and climb inside and live under their pancreas. And then it mellows, somewhat... to the point where you can barely look at them... without feeling a mild distaste”

thingamagig

Takes me ages to find out if I even like a person! So good couple of years for me. Takes that long to know if someone is a truly decent person that you can trust and respect. Like the Dylan moran quote the last poster put up, love to be love has to last through tough times, anything else is obsession, projection or dumb infatuation.

irish son

We all have different definitions of being in love. One persons love is another's lust or infatuation or even just like.

xLexie

I don't know, even liking someone is a chore for me. I've only ever been in love once and that was something that dawned on me at least 3 years into just being friends, it wasn't one of those intense "I think I'm falling in love" feelings most people seem to get. I have personally never felt that, love, for me, felt like it had hit me like a truck.

lilliebee

I fell in love outside the Ulster Bank in Athlone once

The Big Red Button

I'm with my boyfriend over a year now, and it's my first relationship where we started off as strangers going on a date together, and somehow we ended up falling in love and we're now living together and very very happy. Any relationship I was in before, we'd started out as friends, so I would've known the person very well before dating them.

With my boyfriend, I can actually pinpoint the exact moment that I first realised that maybe I loved him. We were together maybe 3-4 months. We'd been out somewhere that evening, and came back to his place. We'd only just discovered earlier that day that we were both massive fans of Phantom of the Opera, so he put that on to watch as we snuggled up on bed, and we both were singing along with it, as we both knew all the words.

And it just hit me. I'd never been that comfortable with anyone before. First of all, just lying there without clothes on ... sad as it sounds, I'd never been really fully comfortable doing that with anyone else in the past. Secondly, I do not sing in front of anyone. Not friends, not family, no one. (Mostly because I can't. ) And it just hit me, there and then, how we just fit so well together, how I trusted him and knew him in a different way than anything I've ever experienced before.

It was a good few months after that before we actually said it to each other, but that's when I realised that the relationship was something really special. It might sound silly and inconsequential ... but, I don't know, something just clicked inside me that night. It's an amazing feeling.

Itwasntme.

As quickly as I want to. I think we have more control over how we feel than we would like to admit. Falling in love is a choice, whether we are conscious of making that choice or not and irrespective of if said choice is what is best for us at that moment in time. 'The heart wants what it wants' and other such phrases are for me just another way of saying that because of x,y and the unacknowledged z, this person does it for me.

Catari Jaguar

Ron Burgundy can tell us what love is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1W5vwhLcsw

"I'm pretty sure that's not love"

beks101

irish son wrote: »

We all have different definitions of being in love. One persons love is another's lust or infatuation or even just like.

Exactly this.

I recently experienced a romantic disappointment with a guy I'd been friends with for a while who after a few months of dating, turned out to not want me in the same way.

It pretty much floored me. Recently while talking to a friend of mine about it, she said "if he really loved you back, he wouldn't blah blah blah..."

I nearly fell out of my chair. Loved me BACK?? I absolutely, categorically, undoubtedly did not love this guy, despite the strong feelings & intense infatuation & amount of time it's taking me to get over him. It made me realize that to her, lust and obsession and infatuation and endless thoughts of a guy would be how she experiences "falling in love", and that's perfectly fine and valid as one individual experience of romantic love.

But to me, so much more needs to happen to get me there. Love to me is safety. Feeling this innate safety and trust and compassion in someone to the point where even though you're essentially falling without a net, you know you're in the right company to do it. Lust and desire and animal attraction are involved, but without feeling that mutual sense of each other, that honesty and care and mutual "fear" in somebody's eyes, it's really just a crush or a case of being in "like" with somebody.

Time wise, this can't happen overnight. It can't happen at first sight. A few weeks probably wouldn't cut it either, at this overly cautious stage in my life. It's something that needs to grow and be nurtured; both inside of me and as the relationship progresses. There's no timeline on which you can gauge these things really, but for me it's not like flicking a switch where I wake up one morning suddenly in love with someone; the seeds will be planted for a while.

scottweiss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfx7izBNHeI