Do you love easily or with great difficulty?

I am happy to say I haven’t fallen in love a lot at all. I say happily and thankfully as I feel that some that do, have a fundamental flaw in their personalities.

Call it what you will, difficulty? But yes, I do find it difficult to fall in love and accept love. That is a fundamental flaw in my personality! Great question by the way! I have fallen in love three times in 50 years!

I fall in love to easily. I often say that someone was looking out for me when I met my husband because at that point in my life it could have been anyone. He is amazing and treats me with so much respect. I never forget how blessed I am.

Very low, I am not a romantically needy female and have become quite selfish in my middle age now. Hey, I’ve earned it!
Married, raised my daughter, now it’s my time.
I don’t WANT a romantic relationship, it will intrude upon my freedom.

I was married for 22 years, divorced for 10 now.
I don’t think it was love, more infatuation and being young, then slogging it out for too long. I have had several other explorations, but, being in the rather rare category of NT Rational woman on the planet, I am much more interested in learning than love.

I’m a paradox, extroverted by nature but really need my space.

Hm thats hard. Love is different from caring but often our perspective and outlook shifts as we grow and change. Then caring for someone you are romantically affliated with is different then a family or friend although these too change in depth and scope.
I always wuld have said I loved one person and had a list detailing other people I cared about. But when I look back I think time and distance has deemed them less relevent. Fond memories. Many whom I have not seen or talked to in years. Is it fair to say I still care for them? Sure I wish them well and think about them from time to time. I use the lessons I learned from those relationships. But I probably won’t see majority of them again and if I did I doubt anything would rekindle.
So am I deluding myself to think I care? I mean what does that mean? I won’t sacrifice my own wellbeing for them etc.
No I think I have fondness from knowing them intimately.
Is love hard. Well its not easy. I mean you should have enough compatibility trust and timing to want to blend yourself with a person have a big area of overlap see them and help them at their worst celebrate with them at their best for an unforeseen amount of time.
I think love’s easiness depends on expectations. An openness in a willingness to give receive.
At some point in this I stopped referring to m experience and was talking in third person to the hypothetical self.

Well this question made me shed preconceptions of myself.

I lust easily…I get caught up easily…falling in love easily? pretty rare

I don’t understand the point of the question.

I tend to like people easily, I tend to feel compassion for others easily, but as far as love in the romantic sense goes, I guess I’ve never felt it for someone yet.

I have been in love with a lot of women over the course of my life. At least half a dozen. It depends on how you define it. It seems to be something I do; and it feels like being in love is as important as anything else in my life. I think I have done it as much as I did because it is something I may need more than other people do. Without love, I’m pretty sure I would be dead.

Shit, I worried for a long time that I was incapable of romantic love or something. The worry started when I had my first boyfriend when I was 16, and he was wonderful in a lot of ways but I just did not him. I felt like I should but I just couldn’t. I tried to convince myself that I did but it became pretty undeniable after awhile that it wasn’t happening.

I don’t worry about that anymore. I’m in love! It’s really wonderful. But no, it didn’t come easy for me this time around either. For about 6 months my guy and I had a very lighthearted relationship, which was great, something I kind of need in my life. But it didn’t give it the opportunity to get very…deep? A couple of months ago we weathered a small crisis together and that was what did it for me. Because he handled everything very kindly, he was sensitive and reasonable and mature and supportive. It was really great to see that side of him come out. And now we’re in love.

I’m a lover. Not sure that I need it like @wundayatta, but it comes easily to me. I have been dating since I was 14 and have been in love with 7 people. Two of them were worthy of my love, my first girlfriend, and the guy I dallied with over the summer.

It is very hard for me to fall in love. I’m not emotionally needy so I hardly ever notice potential guys around. All in all, I have fallen in love around 5 times. I think that’s a low number considering I’m 50ish and single.

@Yeahright I’m not sure you meant this, but the implication of what you said is that people who love are emotionally needy. You have to be needy to notice potential lovers, in other words.

I wonder if that might be true. I do find the term, “needy” to be a bit pejorative, but perhaps there is an alternative, or perhaps people who fall in love are in need of something, or else they wouldn’t do it. Love needy? If we are self-sufficient emotionally, and if we love ourselves, does that make it less likely we’ll form a match because we simply don’t need other people for that?

Did not mean to use needy in a pejorative way, but your are probably right in that it sounds a bit like that. What I really meant to say was that people who really need that special love in their lives, who make it a priority because that’s what they really want are more likely to notice potential lovers or put themselves in situations where they might find love. I am not self sufficient emotionally, I sometimes feel lonely and wish I’d had someone to love, but it doesn’t happen all the time. Most of the time I’m fine and it is very hard for me to fall in love even when I meet someone I like.

It is actually an interesting thought. I have been told i don’t need the other person enough.

That love is based off mutual need of something. Or that people in love and intimate relationships fulfill a role that not many other people are capable of filling.

Good intimate relationships of any type are based off of equality. Equality of give and take of need. Say as a friendship starts because you both need a dance partner. You are learning something together bonding and exercising which releases endorphins. But a dance partner stays just that unless one of you needs something and takes the next step. Say one needs a ride for a day. Which makes it unequal, but then say to make it even dinner.

If both of you aren’t in need or looking for a friend it could easily end there. But say during the meal you find you both share some world views.

You validate each other. So you do make it a habit to share a meal after class. And a friendship begins to build. But only because of mutual need on some level.

@rosehips It makes sense.

Need? Want? I think that when two people are powerfully drawn together, it can feel like need, but what does that mean? Because you don’t have to be together. You’ll survive without each other. But you are powerfully attracted to each other, and you want to give in and just glom together and that feels like need.

The logic of emotions does not fit well into words, I have found. People who are ruled by words, can let the words talk them out of the feelings. Personally, I prefer the feelings. I’ve spent a lot of my life learning to ignore the words so I can actually feel the feelings.

When I love someone, that is all there is: love. When I think about them, words replace the love with all kinds of practical considerations. Practicality often kills love, I’ve found.

Feeling the feeling and not put some thought into it has never worked for me. I’ve never had that kind of romantic love, there is always something to think about and hence a need to find the words to be able to express those thoughts. Poets make a living out of it.

@wundayatta : I agree with @Yeahright. People’s minds work differently and some do not experience a strict separation between feelings and words. I live for words and language. Indeed I do make my living from words, and I never try to talk myself out of feelings, believe me! This summer when I was burning in Paris I filled a notebook with poetry. I would have suffocated if I had not written about my love for that guy.

Somehow, I think that @wundayatta is a word kind of guy. That’s not the problem. Perhaps the problem is giving in to feelings. Words can stop that from happening. As @Yeahright says, he always thinks, yet has never had romantic love. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Poets make a living by first feeling, and then crafting words. Without the experience, there can be no words. I suspect that if a person is not present during the experience, their words won’t do the experience any justice.

@burntbonez First off, I’m a woman :) and I have been in love a few times in mylifetime, I said that already. You’re misquoting me though. What I said was literally …never had that kind of romantic love referring to the kind of “wordless” love that @wundayatta was describing. Actually, I kind of have fallen in love like that, i.e., w/o much thinking/talking and concentrating on the feeling, but that was a while back in my teen years. These days at my age, I don’t consider what I had then as love but rather as infatuation. For me love is a combination of things, one of which is the feeling but not exclusively. As @bookish1 said people’s mind work in different ways. We’d all agree that love is not easy to define. It’s very hard to say who loves more or loves less, who loves better or more intensely, or more beautifully—you name it. Bottom line, we all love in a different manner. We love in the way that we know how and that suits our personality and that works for each of us. In everything I do, I go with mind and body. I never act just based on my feelings or just based in logic and thinking. I usually combine both. One thing is sure though, I don’t ever ever want to fall in love so madly that I’d lose my mind.

@Yeahright Sorry about that.

Do you do this on purpose, or is it something that just happens without thinking? I mean, do you plan your way through relationships, or do you sometimes go with your impulses?