Hey Babe,
I thought about what you asked about love and how to tell if you’re in love with someone, and I’m standing by my answer, but I have a longer explanation.
It’s different for everyone, probably. For me, I usually do a flash flood type of love. It’s chaotic and messy and I can’t help it or control it in any way so I try not to judge it. Maybe we’re similar like that. It’s warmth that blooms within my chest and rushes up through me, usually making me laugh or changing my voice. The warmth just spreads and swirls and grows and makes my thoughts rush with a million and one possibilities. It makes me sleepless with that feeling that I’m already dreaming when I lay down. If I have to write something or sit down to pay bills, I feel it in my fingers even then. My pen clicks, my foot taps, my teeth bite my bottom lip trying not to smile. A giddy, swoopty-whoop. My biggest tell that I love is probably when I’m out around strangers and I start seeing their features in other peoples’ faces.
It gets said a lot that love makes you do crazy thing and that feels like an understatement. I mean, look at your mom- she’s generally a chill adult but you manage to make her freak out. And vice versa. Love is one of those weird feelings that you just notice, and sometimes it rubs up on the other feelings in a weird way when you have them, like when you’re disappointed or angry… And sometimes, if you’re not enough in love with yourself, your love for someone else can run out. Like the idea of a cup inside of you slowly spilling out over time, it gets filled up initially when you fall in love and things are bliss and high energy and learning and new and shiny and then- not so much. Things get a bit duller, a bit more expected, sometimes unstimulating. I hope you make sure you love yourself just as much as you love anyone else (if not more, because you should love yourself tremendously, the way I love you).
Please be honest with yourself and anyone else your feelings deal with. You’re a beautiful person. Your intensity and depth for emotion might just be uncomfortable for people who don’t know how to be sensitive. There is people who embrace that level of emotionality and they are the ones who can understand and give back to you everything you offer.
Love is a beautiful, wonderful thing. Maybe the hardest part about it is that if you fall in love with someone… well, I don’t see how you could ever go back to knowing what it felt like before you loved them. Some of my friends assure me that they’ve stopped loving their exes from the past, but for me, I don’t think that will ever stop. I’ll never be with them again, but the love we shared has stayed with me through all of my relationships afterward. And you’ve lived enough of a life to understand which people don’t appreciate what you’re giving them and which are safe for you to pour your heart into. I worry about you doing what I did, giving and searching and feeling and lusting and loving and going and going… I’m wishing and hoping that you don’t take so long finding others to love that you put off falling in love with yourself, it takes a long time sometimes to start to be able to hear your own voice when you’re so in tune with someone else’s. And I know that you have great love to give, we’ve been over that, but I hope you know the value in your love and spend it on yourself before spending it on others. If I could think of another way to say that again differently, I would, but I can’t, so I won’t. And I can’t wait to hear more about how you fell in love and how you knew it.
Anyone who has you in their life is lucky, but the person who gets to have your love and attention? Jackpot.
Love you, Babe.
-Kristy