|
Love is the most genuine feeling of all, yet there is no definitive way of expressing its existence. Love comes softly in your heart and takes over your mind and souk completely. Helen Keller expressed love as "Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same." To be in love with someone and loved back is an incredibly wonderful feeling that cannot be replaced with anything. Now if you are wondering about how to know that you're in love then this read is going to be extremely helpful for you. Here you will get to know the meaning of love and how it changes your personality by looking at love from different angles. So, without further ado, let's get started.
Definition of Love According to Literary Geniuses
Love has always remained and still is, the most talked about subject in the literary circle, and yet there are no particular words that can wholesomely describe its beautiful existence, and how to be sure that you are in love. And this uncertainty is what makes it beautiful, curious, fragrant, inexpressible, and most of all, necessary for living. Let's try to understand the beauty of love and its tremendous emotional impact on our personality through the words of literary notables.
• Starting with one of the most prestigious writers of all time, Agatha Christie. Agatha Christie shared her views about the indescribable feeling of love in her autobiography by saying, "It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them." When we are around someone who we wholly adore and have something special for in our hearts, we feel extraordinarily special. And no matter what how childish or ridiculous things they do, our heart keeps fluttering for them in awe and amazement.
• If you wish to learn about different stages of affection, romance, and love and what physical and anatomical changes these feelings bring in our personality, then you must study the great works of Stendhal. His timeless piece, "Stendhal: On Love" has superbly described the ongoing alteration of feelings and emotions for a single, the most special person. In the chapter of this book titled as "Concerning the Birth of Love", Stendhal beautiful portrayed the amazing feeling of love by saying, " To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return." When in love, you almost constantly think of the delight of kissing that person and what it would be like to kiss back. In another piece, he wrote, "Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. … there are no age limits for love." This particularly advocates the theory that love does not know any boundaries, of any kind. Love sees and feels beyond physical attraction or age numeric. A young person can fall in love with an older one and vice versa, and the depth and the passion of love will be the same.
• Loving someone and being loved, are essential elements of life. None of us can live a life without tasting the soothing experience of love. Kurt Vonnegut expressed the utter importance of love in human life in his science fiction series, "The Sirens of Titans" as, "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved." And in the same book he wrote, “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” Love gives purpose to your life. It gives you an aim to get up, start your day, and be around the person you love. Not only that, but it also gives you courage, passion, and resilience to go above and beyond for bringing the happiness and content on the face of your beloved. Love lets you cross your boundaries and achieve a greater good in life.
• Often, we find ourselves indulged in the discussion of the connection between love and friendship, especially between different sexes. C.S Lewis, a very wise man, had remarkably explained this connection or correlation of friendship and love in his book, "The Four Loves" as he wrote, “When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half-hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had; to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision.” The amalgamation of jealousy sparks a distinctive sense of ownership on your lover, and this feeling of envy is like a mark that you have fallen for this person, truly, madly and deeply. So, if you are wondering about how to know that you're in love, then evaluate your feelings when you see that special person mingling heartily with another person. This feeling will ring some bells in your heart.
• At one place in "The Four Loves", C.S Lewis described the juxtaposition of pain and tranquility that comes along with the joy of being in love. No matter who you love, when you fall in love, or what kind of relationship you have with your lover, at one point or another, you will find your heartbroken. The intensity and depth of this feeling are such that it does not make you realize this pain soon but later. Lewis wrote, "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." And when you feel all these feelings rising within you, commencing turbulence within the calm of your inner self, then you will get the answer to how to know that you're in love because you are in love.
• Love gives meaning to your life and you start feeling that only now you have some purpose to wake up and get on with the day. The passion and depth of love bring in clarity of the reality around you and of yourself as well. As Haruki Murakami wrote "If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person." Charles Bukowski has beautifully described the existence of this beautiful feeling, as it may seem short but it will leave long-lasting effects in your life. He wrote in one of the most famous books, "Love is a Dog from Hell" that "Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality." The beautiful period of the young morning that Bukowski has chosen to explain the serenity and softness of the love just perfectly portray the coolness and tranquility of this feeling. With such feeling burning inside of you, you can understand the answer to how to know that you're in love. Just like Bukowski said, "one more creature
dizzy with love"
• Charles Bukowski wrote in the same book, “I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.” Here he let us realize the intensity of love that does not rely on the physical relationship. Nowadays, we often listen in real-life and reel life, that only the sexual relationship can let you touch the heights of love, the depths of affection, and the peak of a perfect relationship. Whereas Bukowski said here that this love in which a lover can only feel the fragrance of his/ her lover by thinking about him/ her, or just by seeing a long lost photograph encompass tons of feelings inside.
• Russian Novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is particularly famous for his epic work "The Crime and Punishment" was a genius in expressing human feelings through the magic of mesmerizing words. His grasping words and enchanting stories let you realize the world within the world around you. In describing the feeling of love, Dostoevsky superbly coincides and compares it with the agony of being in hell. As he wrote in "The Brothers Karamazov", “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” He said that if one does not have the tendency to love someone that it surely means that his heart is burning like a hellfire.
• At another place in the same book, Dostoevsky described the reality of love for mankind by writing, “I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love a man in particular.” Knowing all the different kinds of love and feelings of affection, Dostoevsky has perfectly said such a deep thing in simple words. The more you start sensing love for the poor, needy, and people in pain, the more you start understanding the double standards of our society where people in power do anything and everything for their profit. Your love for mankind gets deeper and deeper and at the same time, you start seeing the filthy faces of people.
• On your quest of how to know that you're in love, you will love the words of Dostoevsky that “To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” When you love someone, you just see the best parts of their being, the parts God wanted them to reflect in the world. This is the purest form of love when you stop seeing the wrongs in one's personality and just love their presence around you. You just think of them as a gift of God for you.
• Now let's take guidance from one of the greatest of all time, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins beautifully explained the power of love in the letter to his daughter saying, "People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence. " When you are in love with someone, and that person loves you back, it does not remain just an inside feeling, rather you will see it through powerful actions, and gestures of kindness, favors, and soft tones of voices. The purest and kindest form of love shows its existence through different mediums and is never shy.
• Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer, is one of the greatest writers of this age. He has splendidly portrayed the beautiful human emotions through his mesmerizing and enchanting words. About love, he wrote in his book, "Kafka on the Shore" that, "Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time." After reading this, the question of how to know that you're in love does not remain that difficult at all. As you love someone who completes you as a person, someone whom you adore, who's personality completes yours. And if you have found someone like this, then losing this person will make you sad.
• In "South of the Border, West of the Sun", Haruki Murakami wrote, " I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong." The hurtful feeling of not loved back is inexpressible, and surely unimaginable by a lover. If your lover does not consider you enough for him/ her, then carrying on the relationship is totally in vain, it will bring nothing but regrets, pain, and lonesomeness. However, the pain of not being around with your lover is intolerable as well. The deep ache of losing your lover remain with you all day long and through the night. Lao Tzu said, " Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses." And the feeling of such crazy passion, when remained thirsty of its lover, will surely find itself wandering in excruciating pain, and regret.
• Some great geniuses have described love as madness, as an act of crazy people. Such as, Louis de Bernieres wrote in Corelli's Mandolin that, "Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident." It is one aspect of love, or you can say he has touched the subject of love with a different and unique angle. The ignition of excitement, and passion that love spark within yourself often subside your ability to rationalize things and situations you are dealing with. And once, this fog of crazy passion lifts, you start seeing the ultimate reality of things.
There you go! We do hope that you must have enjoyed reading all the definitions and explanations of love as described by the geniuses of society. And these explanations must have answered how to know that you're in love and surely by the end, you must have realized your true feelings for that special one.
Apart from these great explanations, the following are the simplest signs of knowing that you are in love. How to know that you're in love will become super easy for you if you start reading these signs,
• You can't stop thinking about the same person all day long, during work, even doing something really important. As William Shakespeare said, " Love is too young to know what conscience is." You lose the conscious of your surroundings and just lost in the thoughts of a special person.
• When that person is around you, you just cannot stop staring at them.
• Most of the time, you feel that you are on some kind of drugs as you feel high.
• The thought of watching them sad makes you unhappy as well, and you just want them to be happy always, And to do that, you start acting ridiculous yourself.
• You start acting strange and stressed out, and nothing except that person seems to be working for you.
• You go above and beyond in impressing them. And in doing so, you start trying new things. And also start liking these new changes within your personality as well.
• Your heart skips a beat whenever your lover is around, and you start synchronizing your actions with them.
• You start liking something you never liked before.
• You like their quirky self.
When you start reading these signs within your personality then know that you've fallen for someone and just start enjoying the beautiful feeling of love.
|