How can you tell? What is the difference? Sometimes it isn’t so easy to determine friendship vs love. Some people go through their entire lives never knowing how to tell the two apart. Others go through life convinced that they will never, at any cost, allow friendship to turn into love. I used to be the latter. My early life was filled with horrible confusions stemming from friendship vs love. I thought love was so easy to define and that when it hit me I would know it. Boy was I wrong. After over 10 years of some of the hardest life lessons about friendship vs love that one person should ever have to endure I feel qualified to help guide others to their own determination. It also helps that I finally got things figured to the point where I genuinely fell in love with someone and decided spend the rest of my life with her. When you take the time to figure it out, it can be the greatest feeling you will ever have.
Many people maintain that a true friendship is based on trust. I would disagree with that. I would say it is more accurate to say that a true friendship is based on taking the time to know your friend’s strengths and weaknesses. I have a lot of friends. Most of them I trust. Some of them I do not. But I know that up front. If I put trust in a friend that is not trustworthy then who is at fault? I would say I am because I knew that friend could not be trusted. Of course it also depends on your own criteria. If you need trust in a friend then continuing to associate with people you deem to be not trustworthy seems a bit counterproductive.
Friends are usually acquired in layers. Most people have a lot of people they call friends but only a select few are part of their “inner-circle.” Being able to determine your friends’ shortcomings, and then dealing with those shortcomings appropriately, is what allows you to determine the difference of friendship vs love. It is your ability to decide which personality traits you truly find appealing in a friend that allows you to move any given friendship to that next level and fall in love. So, if friends can come in all shapes and sizes, and friends can possess a wide variety of personality traits, how do we know when we are truly in love? If you stop to think about it, and read carefully what I just wrote, the answer actually becomes pretty easy.
Many sitcoms depict marriage as a never-ending battle between a man and a woman. The woman tries hard to make her man happy and the man will crack jokes about how far she falls short of accomplishing her goal. Many people seem to think that the sitcom couple is how things should work. My feeling is that if you are truly in love with someone then it is actually the direct opposite. My wife and I have never fought. We have been married for over 5 years now and we have been together longer than that. I knew I was in love when I realized that my wife made living my life with her was so much easier than living it without her. That, in my opinion, is the essence of truly being in love. The person you feel you are in love with adds so much to your life that you feel richer because of it. The notion that you have to see someone everyday, and that their physical look and presence is very appealing to you so you want to have it all the time, is not love. That is infatuation. The difference between friendship vs love is that you realize that the person you are in love with does not force you to have to deal with their shortcomings. There is not inconvenience in being in love with that person. You do not feel the need to compensate for anything about that person. Being in love is that feeling that your relationship with that person is perfectly complimentary to your own life. You don’t constantly have to justify to yourself why you are with that person. You know that your life is better because that person is a part of it. Once you can truly say that about your friend, and you know those feelings are a lot stronger than just friendship, then you know you have truly fallen in love.