one thing i’ve learned recently is that not everyone experiences love in the same way, which is to say that different mixtures of emotions play into their feelings of love
I mean, I guess it sounds obvious when you say it but it wasn’t obvious to me until recently when I was comparing notes with others.
For example, for me the most prominent emotion that plays into how I experience love (for both romantic love and platonic love) is: fondness. By "fondness" I mean: memories that I share with a person that I look back fondly on. Moreover, once I realized this it helped me better understand how I relate to love, including some things that are perhaps a bit idiosyncratic to me.
One way this affects me is that it's really easy for me to fall in love with other people; like, almost pathologically so. After all, it's not that hard to form fond memories with someone (just spend enough quality time with them, really) and once I do I start to catch feelings for that person fairly quickly.
Another way this affects me is that romantic partners are often dumbfounded by why I'm in love with them. For example, they will often express sentiments of not feeling that special to me because there is nothing that seems unique about them. It can sometimes take time to convince them that it really is as simple as me sharing fond memories with them (since those shared memories are indeed unique to them).
Fondness also makes me much more inclined to stay in a relationship as long as possible, even abusive relationships. Whenever I contemplate exiting from a relationship my mind will compulsively replay fond memories which will make me extremely emotional and give me second thoughts about leaving.
However, when sharing my experiences with others I learned that other emotions (like psychological safety or trust) seem to play a more prominent role in their experience of love. That's not to say that those emotions don't play into my own experience of love (for example: psychological safety also affects my feelings towards a romantic partner) but nowhere near to the same extent as fondness does.
which is not to say everything is identical for me, but yeah... I love easily, can't always express why, and have spent many years in relationships long after I knew I shouldn't because of the memories connected to them. And after spending the last few years deconstructing and disentangling factors among my romantic and sexual attractions, it has become abundantly clear that everyone characterizes love differently and my own experience is not the mainstream expectation (but also not foreign to the point of incompatibility).
People are weird and unique and it's goddamn magical. 💖
