How to tell the difference between love and friendship: 4 tips

Friendship is also love, but some people do not know how to distinguish it from the desire to form a couple.

Friendship is also a type of love, although this affective bond is not like the one at the basis of couple relationships, traditionally associated with romantic love, which we normally consider to be the default form of "love".

However, the realm of emotions is almost always complex and difficult to foresee. Having a realistic understanding of our own feelings is an art, and achieving this is the exception, not the rule. That is why, some people are hesitant to differentiate between love and friendship.. This is precisely what we will talk about in the following lines.

Differentiating love from friendship: how to know what I feel?

The first thing to understand when trying to distinguish between friendship affection and romantic love is that both experiences are mediated by the way our culture has influenced our way of being, thinking and feeling.

That means, among other things, that what you feel does not emerge from your body encoded in neatly separated categories, as we might expect if emotions were like the elements of a periodic table. Part of what we feel is how we interpret it, so that concerns and beliefs about what we are experiencing affect, in practice, that feeling. affect, in practice, that emotion.

Part of the difficulty of distinguishing between love and friendship, then, is knowing how to distinguish between what that person makes us feel and what the experience of knowing that we are developing an affective bond whose nature we have yet to understand. The expectations we have when we have feelings for someone play a role in how we want to relate to them and how they react if we interact with them. play a role in how we want to relate to them and how that person reacts if we interact with them.

That said, let's look at some tips on what to do to distinguish between love and friendship.

1. Is there chemistry in intimacy?

Intimacy is a key aspect of a couple's love relationship.. However, it should not be confused with sexual connection. Asexual people are not by definition deprived of the experience of love, but it is true that they do not feel a very intense sexual connection to someone in particular.

This chemistry in the typical intimacy of love, then, in most cases also affects the sexual, but it is not limited to this and is present in many other forms of physical relationships: hugs, kisses, caresses, mutual care.... Normally, if there is friendship, most of these experiences are not seen as necessary, although there are always exceptions.

2. Is there a willingness to compromise?

In love relationships, the people involved tend to want to establish a minimum commitment. That is why, if some time passes without the other person having tried to contact them, for example, disappointment and sadness appear, disappointment and sadness appear..

This commitment is not equivalent to what has traditionally been considered as "fidelity" based on a monogamous model, but has to do with the broader meaning of the word: making sacrifices and agreements to keep the bond alive and make it have its place in the future, instead of leaving everything to improvisation or sporadic encounters. A person who sees an unwarranted imposition in this idea of basing his or her relationship with another on a certain degree of commitment is probably feeling friendship, not conventional love.

3. Make sure that pity does not play a role.

There are relationships that begin because one partner feels a mixture of affection and compassion for a person he or she considers helpless and lonely. This experience, although based on compassion, generates obvious problems. On the one hand, it perpetuates the idea that a person is lonely unless he or she has a partner with whom he or she has a romantic love bond, which is clearly wrong, and on the other hand, it makes it easier for the other person to generate expectations of him or herself, it makes it easier for the other person to generate wrong expectations..

Therefore, another of the necessary but not sufficient conditions to distinguish between friendship and love is to make sure that the time and activities shared with that person are not based on pity. For example, we can conduct small experiments based on imagination, such as imagining that person starting to date another person with whom there is clearly a love connection. How does that make us feel? If the answer has something to do with relief, it is very likely to be friendship..

4. Analyze the intensity of the emotion

Normally, friendships are seen as something flexible, which can drop out of the picture for a while, only to reappear some time later. However, in the case of love, the emotion is often so intense that the idea of interrupting the the idea of interrupting the relationship, even temporarily, is experienced in a dramatic and clearly painful way. and clearly painful, and feeling a strong mourning for this loss.

The emotions felt through love are too intense for us to be comfortable with the experience of not knowing if tomorrow that person will still be there for us.

This "rigidity" in the way we assess whether or not our expectations are being met is another key that can help us distinguish between friendship and love.