How do we know we are loved?

How do we know we are #loved?  It takes faith to know that we are loved, if we are foolish enough to demand proof, it would be a testament to our bad faith in the matter and negate the love 

unself-consciously feel toward us.  Love is one of those things where believing a thing makes it so.

Unfortunately, the other person has to believe it too.  And there is always the chance of being fooled or one of us saying something that "changes everything."  So, it is natural for people to want #reassurances, because people are complex and sometimes even intense love can co-exist with resentment or ambivalence, or be clouded by dependency.  Or the basis of the attraction is that the person embodies some of the same traits we do, and so what we are actually in love with is a reflection of ourselves.  The other person becomes a mere gallows for the projection of our narcissism.  In such a case, believing we are loved truly does make it so. 

I think that any two people who choose to spend time with one another love each other in some way, and it grows and changes over time.  But if we are talking about being "#in love," as in infatuation, that is an involuntary condition, which is almost an illness, whose symptoms we can observe in another.  They are nervous, excited, have trouble eating and sleeping, have a constant need for touching, they can think of nothing else but us, and they have a very short refractory period.  (Plus our friends will tell us to get a room.)

Touch, I think, is the great discriminator, especially the #kiss. (Do they give themselves to you?  Do they kiss you back? Do they want to kiss at all?) The problem is, when we are "in love" we are willing to overlook a lot--in fact, we deliberately blind ourselves.  And sometimes we overlook indicators of ambivalence and reluctance early on that become a yawning chasm later.  That doesn't mean that we weren't loved.  Someone who is in love thinks in terms of "us" and "ours" rather than "me" and "mine" and "you" and "yours."  And, if we spend more time fighting than we do making love, we may be in love but it's not going to last. 

Now if we are #control-freak who just has to know "does she/he love me or not?" and if we to have to proof, then we might give up on the relationship. There is no way any relationship will grow in tat kind of environment so we might give up and move on. #Trust and #faith is what #love takes to grow.

Just because somebody loves us now doesn't mean they will always love us.  Sometime love changes hour to hour, day to day, year after year.  And just because somebody sticks with us, doesn't mean they always will, or, if they do, that it will be out of love.