In Love with more than ONE person ?  Lust or Love ! 

by Sonali Rawat

Falling in love is easy. It’s sustaining the feelings that are the hard part. Now and then, someone comes along and turns your world upside down. They make your blood rush in all the right places and your belly flutter with butterflies. This heady feeling can either mean you are in the early stages of love or simply in lust. But what to do with that giddy feeling? 

The most common feeling to differentiate between the two Ls which our world preaches is -- Lust comes only from sexual desires, & Love comes from the emotional caring for a person. But what do you do when you are stuck in between? 

Demisexuals ..... I hear ya all .... ;-) 

Physical attraction can be strong for both emotions, but where one is interested in nurturing a more profound connection, the other is more interested in living it up now. Since they both feel like the real thing at first, what are the signs it’s lust, not love? I will discuss 11 ways to differentiate in this post. Read on.

1. Your Attraction Is More Physical Than Anything Else

The connection you share with your partner in lust takes root in physical attraction. You fawn over your partner’s looks, and they are obsessed with your body. While that’s not a red flag in itself, love tends to do you both better; in addition to the physical, you two also want to connect on an emotional level.

Granted, you want to have sex with the person you are attracted to in both love and lust. However, where lovemaking is a means to an end (growing more intimate), with the former, it is an end itself for the latter.

2. You Have To Dress To Impress

When your relationship thrives on nothing but the physical, keeping the looks 100 becomes your only chance of feeding the connection. It’s like being on a perpetual mission to seduce. You feel like you have to continually look nice to keep the sexual attraction between you and your partner alive.

While love isn’t blind to looking good, too, it’s not the sole glue keeping you together. You don’t feel the need to put the utmost effort into your appearance all the time because you are that comfortable around each other.

3. Flaws Are A Dealbreaker

What do you expect when you form a connection with a real person based on fantasy? Unlike with true love, your entire attraction to someone you lust after is rooted in this perfect image you have of them. Anything that doesn’t fit into the idealized narrative you’ve created in your mind can make everything come crashing down.

Whether that is beauty, power, money, or what have you if the thing that most captivates you about the person you are attracted to disappears today, would you still want them? If you can’t very well answer yes to that question, then it’s not love.

4. Your Connection Is Only Skin-Deep

For all of its allure and very real intensity, the feeling of lust only runs skin-deep. Like I mentioned earlier, the thrill is fueled by physical attraction and not much else. Everything from your conversations to other aspects of your interaction is all a means to an end, sex.

No one is interested in mundane stuff like really getting to know the other person beyond how they like to be touched and what they do for fun. Long-lasting love, on the other hand, seeks to dig beneath the beautiful. In other words, it wants to know what makes your person tick and connect on a level that stands after the electricity inevitably fades.

5. You Hardly Fight

Years of being in love and nurturing a relationship can produce couples who hardly argue. But not only are such couples rare, but they also put in the work both individually and as a unit to get to that stage. However, if you are just starting out with someone and you two never fight about anything, that does not make a healthy relationship.

That said, it’s actually easier than you would think not to have conflicts in a lustful relationship. What do you expect when both parties make a conscious effort to only show their best sides to their partner? You tend to let things slide more when you have no real investment in someone beyond the now, hence the dearth of dispute in lust-fueled interactions. 

6. When Conflicts Do Happen, You Move On With No Real Resolution

Still, given you are both human, it’s unrealistic to expect not to ever argue, even if you are both acting. You may both be afraid of expressing your true feelings, but there’s only so much a person can take, so one way or another, a conflict will happen sometimes.

Now, the way you both handle your fights when they come up is just as telling as any other sign. You see, relationships held together by love use conflict as an opportunity to learn more about each other and grow as a team. For that to happen, both parties have to be interested in getting to the root of the issue, which means getting in touch with and discussing uncomfortable emotions.

Given its superficial nature, this might be too much to ask of a lustful relationship, so arguments just end up getting swept under the rug instead.

7. You Keep Your Circles Apart

When you love someone and envisage yourself with them in the future, you want to do your best to make your two worlds one. That is, you want your loved ones to accept your person, and you want theirs to love you too.

On the flip side, lust feels moves like that make things too real. It’s much harder to stay in fantasyland when you’re meeting each other’s, less-than-perfect friends and family.

8. Sex, Sex, And More Sex

Are your best moments together bedroom-related? Does everything you do and say with each other begin and end with burning loins? You can’t hang out without ripping each other’s clothes off, texting turns sexual, even phone calls end in “what are you wearing” always? 

A healthy level of sexual intimacy is certainly #goals between consenting adults, but there also has to be a balance if we’re talking about relationships. If what you have with your partner is marked solely by sexual gratification, you are almost certainly in lust and not love.

9. There Is Always An Air Of Mystery Between You

Do you know what makes lust and infatuation so fleeting? It’s that they thrive on the mystery. Like how you can have a raging crush on someone, and it all just goes out the window after one or two long conversations. Or how you have the hots for a person, and you lose interest after you’ve had a taste, without the sex necessarily being terrible.

It’s because it’s the mystery that really gets you going, something about our desire to get ungettable. As long as they are able to remain mysterious, lust and infatuation won’t stop trying. So, if you and your partner don’t really know each other because you’re always too busy getting to know each other’s body rather than as a whole, it’s most likely not love.

10. You Are Not Going The Extra Mile

Your willingness — or lack thereof — to go the extra mile can also shine a light on the difference between lust and love. The only thing you can expect the former to work hard at is keeping your bedroom affairs going for as long as you’ll both have each other.

Every other thing, like really getting to know each other (the good, bad, and unsexy detail) and staying dedicated to one another, flaws and all, are a bit out of lust’s ballpark.

11. You Ignore Red Flags

Finally, if you find yourself continually having to keep mum about things that bother you in the person you like or afraid to challenge the status quo, that’s not love. Better yet, if you speak up about those things and your relationship actually goes under because of it, then, it’s definitely not love.

And that is the ultimate difference between lust and love, where one can take being called out and acts accordingly, the other, not so much. Hopefully, by now, you can tell which is which.