Can Romantic Love Be Good For You?

The feeling of love is so fundamental and natural that without it human beings would find themselves stranded in an eternity of meaningless existence. What does love feel like? What does love feel like for you? How can you love if you don’t even know how? When does love become a problem?

Love encompasses a broad range of positive and negative emotional and physical states, from the deepest romantic desire, the strongest personal affection, to the lightest mundane pleasure. At its simplest level, love is a form of bonding between two people who are romantically involved with one another. At its most powerful form, love involves feelings so intense that death is not even a part of the equation. On the other end of the spectrum, when love becomes a problem, it typically involves one person who demands undying loyalty from another while being unable to provide it himself. In both cases, one of the partners usually feels very deeply distressed by the situation.

Love involves emotions like joy, excitement, contentment, and so on. Love differs from sexual love, in that while love between strangers can be highly intense and satisfying because of the release of sexual tension, there is typically much more restraint involved in the release of romantic love. Sexual intimacy between lovers provides release of erotic energy, but it typically involves the exchange of one form of energy for another, rather than the release of all energies in and of themselves. People go through a lot of effort to keep loving intimate; it can be intensely intimate yet restrained.

The way that love includes or involves itself with one’s well-being is a more complicated matter. Love, above all else, is the recognition of your own value as a unique individual. Individuals often talk about how love allows them to experience a sense of gratitude, of purpose and direction in their lives, of the value of their contributions to their families and friends, and of their own dignity. Love does not typically involve feelings of obligation, or the fear of abandonment. When someone has lost a loved one, this often causes deep feelings of sadness, rather than any heightened sense of responsibility to others.

Love can create positive emotions, but they must be well-grounded in true unconditional love. The absence of some of the negative aspects of love can be an important component of our well-being and our relationships. The focus should always be on meeting the needs of each other, caring about what is important to us, sharing our gifts with each other, taking care of ourselves, accepting and liking our differences, and positively impacting the world around us. It takes an idealistic approach to find true unconditional love. It requires that we make the effort to connect with others on an intuitive level and to accept the good and the bad in other people and in ourselves.

The intensity of your feelings for another person depends on how you are connected to that other person. If you are deeply connected, you will experience many of the powerful emotions of romance. If you are not deeply connected, you may still experience romantic love, but it may not have the same emotional intensity as if you were. No matter how close or how far apart two people live, they are still connected through shared physical intimacy. If you want to experience true romance in your relationship, you have to feel as though you are connecting on every level with another person.