What Real Love Actually Is… Not. 

We covered in a previous article that infatuation is often mistaken for love. Read that article here… Those early butterflies, the obsessive thoughts, the way someone consumes your every waking moment—these intense feelings can be intoxicating. But they’re not love. They’re limerence, that heady cocktail of chemistry and projection that feels like destiny but is actually just your brain on a dopamine high. Here’s a crucial distinction: love is not something that happens to you. If love feels like it’s happening to you – if you feel swept away, consumed, or powerless in its grip – then it’s almost certainly infatuation at work. Real love doesn’t ambush you. It doesn’t arrive like a storm you can’t control.

So if real love isn’t an emotional warm fuzzy feeling, then what is it exactly?

Real love is a decision, a conscious choice to care deeply about someone. It’s deliberate. Intentional. It requires presence of mind, not loss of it. And here’s something that might challenge everything you’ve been told: real love does not involve any desire to possess. The moment you find yourself needing to own someone, to control their choices, or to keep them from others, you’ve left love behind and entered the territory of ego and fear. Real love also doesn’t require proximity or have any other requirements. We can love someone from a distance, regardless of how they feel about us. Love isn’t contingent on reciprocation, on someone’s availability, or on getting what we want from them. It’s a stance we take, a way of regarding another person with genuine care and goodwill, independent of circumstances.

But here’s where it gets even more challenging: our ability to love others is an extension of our ability to love ourselves. If our self-love is incomplete, then our ability to love others will also be inadequate and often hurtful. 

As Thich Nhat Hanh so wisely observed – “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.”

This is perhaps the most important truth about love: you cannot give what you don’t have. When we haven’t learned to accept, appreciate, and care for ourselves with compassion, our attempts at loving others become distorted. We seek validation instead of connection. We grasp instead of holding gently. We project our wounds instead of seeing clearly. And even when we do the work – even when we cultivate genuine self-love and learn to love others with clarity and care—we must be honest about one more thing: even real love is not unconditional love. As human beings, we will always fall short of true unconditional love, even if we manage to come close by learning to love ourselves and others almost without reservations or conditions. We’re not enlightened beings. We have limits, boundaries, and needs. And that’s okay. Real love doesn’t demand perfection from us; it simply asks that we keep choosing it, consciously and deliberately, as best we can.

Love Is Radical Acceptance

Real love involves accepting someone for all that they are, exactly as they are, without the desire to change anything about them to accommodate our own preferences and agendas. Read that again. Without the desire to change anything. This is where most of us stumble. We meet someone, fall into infatuation, and immediately begin a mental renovation project. “They’re perfect, except they’re a bit too messy. A bit too introverted. A bit too focused on their career. But once we’re together, they’ll change.” No, they won’t. And real love doesn’t ask them to. Real love says: “I see you. All of you. The parts that delight me and the parts that challenge me. The habits that charm me and the ones that irritate me. And I’m choosing you anyway—not the edited version I wish you were, but the actual person standing in front of me.” This doesn’t mean tolerating abuse or abandoning your boundaries. It means releasing the arrogance of believing someone needs to be different to be worthy of your love.

Beyond Selfish Appreciation

Here’s another uncomfortable truth: infatuation loves selectively. It highlights the qualities that serve us and conveniently blurs out the rest. Real love involves developing an appreciation for all the traits and qualities expressed by a person, not just those that support our preferences and agendas. Your partner’s stubbornness that frustrates you? It’s also the backbone of their resilience. Their emotional intensity that sometimes overwhelms you? It’s the same depth that allows them to love fiercely. Their need for solitude that leaves you feeling lonely? It’s the wellspring of their creativity and self-awareness. Real love develops a panoramic view. It stops cherry-picking qualities and starts seeing the full ecosystem of who someone is—understanding that you can’t have one trait without its shadow, that every strength has a corresponding challenge, and that this complexity is what makes them human. When you truly love someone, you stop rating their qualities on a scale of convenient-to-inconvenient. You start appreciating how all their traits weave together to create the unique person they are.

The Deepest Level: Love as Gratitude

But real love can evolve even further. It deepens and transforms when it starts to include an appreciation for the role a person played in our growth, the ongoing process of self-discovery and personal empowerment. This is where love becomes truly transcendent. When you can look at someone and feel genuine gratitude—not just for the joy they brought you, but for the ways they challenged you, stretched you, and helped you become more fully yourself—you’ve touched something profound. Maybe they showed you where you needed stronger boundaries. Maybe they reflected back patterns you needed to see. Maybe their love gave you the safety to explore parts of yourself you’d kept hidden. Maybe their presence in your life catalyzed a transformation you didn’t even know you needed. Real love recognizes that the people we’re closest to are often our greatest teachers. They don’t just share our journey—they actively shape it. And when we can honor someone for their role in our evolution, even when that role was difficult, we’ve moved beyond transactional love into something much richer.

The Practice of Real Love

Real love isn’t a feeling that happens to you. It’s a practice you choose, again and again. It’s the choice to see clearly rather than through the fog of projection. It’s the discipline of appreciation even when disappointment tempts you. It’s the wisdom to recognize that the person challenging your growth is often loving you more deeply than the person simply telling you what you want to hear. But it begins with you. With learning to love yourself—not in some self-indulgent way, but with genuine acceptance, compassion, and care. Only then can you offer real love to others without wounding them with your unmet needs and unhealed wounds. Infatuation asks: “How does this person make me feel?” Real love asks: “Who is this person, really? Can I honor all of who they are? And have I done the work to love them skillfully?” That’s the difference. And it changes everything!

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