How Do You Know When You Love Someone? 10 Signs To Tell

For any relationship that lasts long enough, there comes the point in time when we start to wonder: Do I love him? We know we feel something for him – we get butterflies when his name pops up on our phone, we miss him the moment we leave him, and he’s always the first person we want to call when something crazy/incredible/difficult happens.

But is it love? Or are we just getting swept up with the idea of being in love – caught up in a concoction of emotions and in the throes of the honeymoon phase? How do we know the difference between really liking someone, and truly loving them? What are the signs?

If you’ve been asking yourself these questions, read on to find out. 

You Prioritize Him

We’re selfish beings. We’d always rather have exactly what we want, when we want it. Thinking about anyone but ourselves isn’t natural to us, but as soon as we start thinking about someone else as much as we think of (or even more than we think of) ourselves… We’re probably in love, which helps us become more selfless, considerate, and attentive. Being in love with someone causes us to prioritize them, to care about them, their needs, and their desires more than our own.

You Don’t Like To Think about Life without Him

On the thread of being selfish, we also like having a life of our own. It’s simpler not to have to fully meld our life with someone else, and while we might’ve liked our ex, when it came time to think about life without him, somehow, we weren’t that broken up.

But if we’re in love with someone, we won’t like to think about doing life without him. His presence in our life is positive, and the thought of losing him isn’t something we want to entertain.

You Trust His Opinion

Most of us only care to hear a few people’s opinions – maybe our mom’s, our best friend’s, or our brother’s. But for the most part, we can’t respect someone’s opinion if we don’t trust them, care about them, and love them.

When we’re in love, we’ll trust his opinion when we’re feeling unsure of how to proceed with a problem at work, or how to solve a fight with our friend. 

There’s No Such Thing As ‘The Ick’ with Him

“The ick” has taken the internet by storm, with countless young women saying they lost attraction to their boyfriend for petty reasons – anything from raising his hands on a rollercoaster to getting locked out of his house to having an ugly phone case. Often enough, a girl’s reason for getting the ick is because her boyfriend did something silly (or even just normal), and not overtly masculine.

But when we’re in love, we won’t care about whatever silly or weird thing he does – oddly, that will make us see just how much we love him. As Agatha Christie once said, “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.”

You See His Flaws But Love Him Anyway

When we’re in the honeymoon phase, we can’t see our boyfriend’s flaws. To us, he’s absolutely perfect, incapable of making any mistakes or annoying us. At this point in the relationship, everything is always sunshine and giggles. This must mean I’m in love with him, we think. But this isn’t really what love is all about.

Being in love doesn’t mean we aren’t able to recognize his flaws; it means that we’re very aware of his shortcomings, weaknesses, and issues (and we even try to help him overcome them), and yet, we love him in spite of his flaws. We fully know him, and fully love him.

You Don’t Feel Anxious

The beginning of most relationships, when everything’s new and unestablished, will make us nervous, excited, or jittery. But sometimes, we continue to feel anxious around him – counting down the minutes until we get a text back, replaying what we said to him over and over again in our mind, or stressing out about having a pimple. 

It’s easy to mistake this anxiety as a sign of chemistry, but when we’re in love with someone, we won’t feel anxious about our relationship. Instead, we’ll feel safe, valued, secure, and loved. We’ll know that our relationship stands on solid ground, and our anxiety will be quelled.

You Can Sit in Silence with Him

We’ve all had a relationship, whether romantic, platonic, or familial, that just feels awkward as soon as we run out of things to say – so much that we feel pressure to keep coming up with something, anything, to say.

But this all changes when we fall in love with someone. Sitting in silence with them feels as natural as it does when we’re all alone, and there’s no pressure to stay “on” and always have something to say.

You Want To Know Everything About Him

We naturally want to know more about whatever it is we love. We become experts on our favorite TV show, know every word to our favorite song, and will re-read our favorite book countless times.

It’s similar when we’re in love with someone. We’ll become curious about every detail of their life, and nothing about them will be boring to us. We’ll want to hear about the Christmas they spent at their weird uncle’s house or the field trip they went on in sixth grade that made them want to learn all about the Renaissance or the silly things they used to do with their friends in high school. We’ll always want to know more about them.

You’ve Had Disagreements

Every person’s dream relationship will look different, but there are a few things we all hope for: a similar sense of humor, a mutual respect for one another, and a strong attraction, just to name a few things. Fighting, however, is not part of that list – in fact, we tend to think that having any kind of disagreement in a relationship must mean we’re not meant to be.

But loving someone doesn’t mean we’ll magically agree on everything. Disagreements are part of relationships. A better sign to look for than no disagreements at all is an ability to resolve conflict well. If we desire to fight well, with the betterment of the relationship as our goal over being “right,” we’re in love.

You Don’t Think about Other Guys

Have you ever been in a relationship that just didn’t feel right? That, for whatever reason, you couldn’t completely invest yourself in? When we don’t feel totally settled in our relationship, we’ll naturally notice and enjoy it when someone else gives us attention, even if we never act on that. Other guys still exist to us.

But when we’re in love, other guys just stop mattering. We don’t pick up on attention from other men because we aren’t looking or hoping for it. We stop caring or thinking about other guys because we already have what we need.

Closing Thoughts

It’s easy to confuse the intoxicating feeling of the honeymoon phase with a lasting love, but there are signs that tell us when what we’re feeling is a fleeting emotion, and when it’s true love.

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