10 Signs You Know It Isn’t Love
Here are ten ways to know it may not be love.
Feelings
Feelings are tricky. They aren’t always factual (like I feel annoyed or ecstatic but not sure why). Feelings can point you in many directions, but at the root of love is the foundation for positive emotions: Do you feel peaceful around them? Accepted? Supporter? Celebrated? Authentic? Do they constantly want the best for you?
That last sentence is super-duper-important: love always wants what’s best, even if it’s hard to do.
Love isn’t obsession or infatuation or attachment or a dozen non-thorned roses on Wednesday. It’s constantly wanting the best for someone. I believe partnering for love is the purest form of energy two people can share and witness together.
Love will unfold how it should; changing shape, letting certain things go, or just being what it is. If you want the best for someone, you’ll want to figure out their love language so you can speak how they need love to be spoken.
If feelings and thoughts and emotions stop you from doing the hard work to allow love to flow, stop listening to your thoughts about feelings and choose better.
That’s how I define emotional maturity nowadays.
Dips
Don’t talk to me about success. Talk to me about your biggest losses. In pro sports, the hardest losses you bounce back from define a season. How do you or your partner deal with losing your pet? A parent? A child? A best friend?
Absolute love finds a way to blossom like a dandelion between a cement sidewalk. It doesn’t wave a white towel or throw haymakers when shit sticks to your shoe. It finds a crack and pushes toward the sun.
If you’re constantly getting stuck on Mt. Everest’s summit every day: lovers beware.
Infatuation is not sustainable because it’s not real life. Real life has dips, pain, suffering, loss, death, violence, anxiety, anger, tough confusing emotions, feelings, and thoughts. And if you’re like, “C’mon man, I love this guy so much — he’s the one.”
Just wait a little bit. The quote, “Fools don’t rush in,” was said for a reason.
Dips show how you act when you’re at your worst — which is valuable for anyone to see, especially your life partner.
Sadness
We all get sad in life. It’s not that we shouldn’t get sad in relationships. We should.(*see part above on feelings).
But do you feel sad because of a lack of connection or a lack of what you imagine love being like? Do you feel sad because your love frequently turns away from you or makes no effort to share their moments with you?
If your sadness exists because of them (I mean, it could be depression, but yeah, get that checked), it’s time to have a serious talk. Sadness, in my experience, comes from a lack of hope in connecting to the person you care about the most. If you look at your day, your week, your life and realize you can’t connect— sadness is a really big sign this isn’t love.
Compatibility
If you don’t laugh, and share a connection, then you might be roommates moonlighting as lovers. Love holds space, time, and energy for whom it loves. It turns toward, not away. It shares in defeat and success. It listens and supports and is, above all, honest.
In sports or music, it’s all about flow. The energy, the ball, the next riff, the love — it rarely stops moving and flowing. So pass the ball and play, man!
The other thing is this: love isn’t like hiring a good employee. If you like how your partner looks in a suit, a hot dress, or how their resume looks on paper, you’re fooling yourself.
Compatibility is about authenticity and how you synergize as a team. Can you enjoy them in sweatpants and no makeup (I only wear makeup on Sundays)? Do you work together on real-life shit — budgets, kids, work and spiritual goals, alone time, together time, etc.? Or do you overcompensate and defend their resume with your friends and family?
Love is collaborative and without hierarchy. There is rarely defensiveness in love. There’s only compatibility — values, interests, humor, ideologies, physical attraction, and speaking their language.
Dialogue
This is a big one, if not the biggest. Do you have an open space to speak about anything and everything without the fear of being right or wrong? Dialogue is one of those things I cannot live without. It’s the lifeblood of my strongest platonic, familial, and romantic friendships. It’s humor. It’s openness. It’s sharing deep thoughts or learnings and frequently living in the self-belief that whoever you are today is enough.
Dialogue allows for this type of love to take root. It lets the internal parts of our brain, body, and soul grow and change and learn what they need to thrive.
If you’re dating someone smart, successful, and physically attractive but can’t have a dialogue about your most meaningful things, is it worth it?
Probably not.
For you sports lovers. Here’s an analogy. It’s like trying to love the Detroit Lions. They constantly hurt and leave me wanting more from our interactions (like at least win an NFL division for once!) That’s why I won’t truly love them or share my deepest questions, dreams, and thoughts with them — they always let me down.
Plus, you can’t hope for something that never listens.
Summits
On another high Mt. Everest note, I’m lucky love celebrates my little wins in life. We moved to a new city, and I lost most of my connections and friends. It’s been scary to start over. Yet, even with one small lead or interaction with someone, she gets so excited for me. She celebrates for me. She hugs, smiles, and smacks my ass like I made a threw a game-winning touchdown.
And God, I hope she knows how proud I am of her; for getting her grants, her lab results, her mice, and her students into science. Love has this acute self-awareness of when to celebrate and when to shut up and shine the light on someone other than you.
And that’s the question — do we celebrate small and big things? Or do we sweep them under the rug and pretend nothing happened? Because if they aren’t present for the big or small wins (they are somewhere else), you might rethink how a love that celebrates your life feels.
Loss
I lost my dog of 18 years this summer. It was one of the saddest moments of my life. I can still see his glossy eyes and limp body as I carried him out of the vet and my partner held me out to the car. She was there for me throughout the entire process. She didn’t just tell me she loved me. She took the last pictures of Bear. She took his last videos with me. She made a memory book. She went the extra mile for me. She helped me dig his grave.
I snot-rocketed boogars and tears for days on end at her, and she just absorbed them. I will never forget that in loss, death, and suffering — love is the ultimate foundation for healing. You want the kind of love that would travel a million miles to find a cure; to get the glass of water and tummy rubs and late-night pharmacy visits for the flu meds when not feeling well; to clean the car randomly and cook dinner and a massage when overwhelmed; to organize the weekly date night and plan the entire trip to Vermont.
Love is there for you when you need it most and shows up with whatever needs to be done. It doesn’t ask stupid questions or stall out when you need it most. It’s steady and strong, and I learned that from my life partner (gracias, mi amor).
Ego
The unchecked ego is likely the root of all dysfunctional relationships.
If you attach to a certain kind of love based on what you’ve seen in rom-com movies, or learned from your parents and friends and uncles and aunts and grandparents, then maybe you need to understand what the ego actually does. Its aim is to keep you safe by constantly thinking, worrying, and stressing about what might go wrong, what should be, or what happened in the past (some call this endless ego chatter the monkey mind).
The ego wants you in its comfort zone.
But that’s it — the ego makes you behave like a dumb, jealous, needy, comfortably numb little-bitch monkey. It tends to separate us from the love of the natural world, the people, the strangers, the family, and friends, and it walls off the love we can give and feel. And worse, most of the time, the ego just wants to keep you safe from the mountain lions, tigers, and bullies to ensure you don’t do anything that would ruin your chances at survival.
You’ll frequently be in flight or fight mode if your love is ego-based. It tries, like really hard, to protect you from your past pain, trauma, or suffering — but on the other side of commitment to non-ego is love.
Validation
If you find yourself saying after a few months of dating, “You’re gonna wed me,” or “Make babies upon babies with me,” or vice versa, you may want to look at why “owning” the object of your love is really about validating yourself.
Love isn't a validated parking ticket.
If you want to marry someone or have kids with them, let it be a mutual decision when you’ve gone through the peaks and the valleys and seen how your love holds up to the nature of life.
If you fear being alone, move too fast, and need regular validation from a partner, maybe this isn’t love. If you have a list of demands, it’s usually a sign you need validation for your lack of patience and self-esteem. (*see section on dialogue).
Love
Love is choosing to stay in the flow. Love isn’t attachment or validation or jealousy or a fancy resume.
It’s embracing the true path of your partner and allowing their soul to grow while challenging each other to find the dark blind spots and baggage and heal the trauma either of you has.
Love isn’t a noun. It’s a verb. It’s constantly serving, being an emotional rock, working through dips, and helping each other find the best route as you travel to the next summit together.
Good luck out there.