Why Falling In Like with Your Partner Is More Important Than Falling in Love
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I love love. I write about love. Love is a beautiful, powerful, and essential emotion for all of us to experience. But I’d like to add another critical L to your relationship vocabulary: LIKE. Like is an underrated and hugely important component in relationships.
Many of us take being in like for granted because we don’t experience the same drama or angst with like that we may have experienced with the ever-powerful force of love. Liking someone does not make us overlook potential red flags or cloud judgment in the way that love might. Like glides in when you’re not looking for it. It is natural and easy.
Being in like is simple. When we like someone, we rarely spend hours analyzing why that’s the case—we simply accept that we enjoy being around the person and want to spend more time with him or her. When we do not like someone outside the context of dating, we usually just avoid spending time around that person. Somehow, though, when we are romantically linked to someone we don’t particularly like, we give in more easily because of love or the other powerful L word—lust.
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Studies show that women fall in love more emotionally than men do. Research conducted by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D. demonstrates that when women are falling in love, memory regions in the brain are active, which may be one reason that women are more likely to fall in love with men they already know and when they least expect it. Sometimes feelings of love are borne out of a very simple and easy experience of deeply liking the person. For this reason, we should all pay close attention to those we fall into like with.
Most of the women I interviewed who ended up with men who were not their standard type could not picture being in love with their partners—they just knew that they enjoyed being around them. They were not pressured by like as they might have been with love, so they were present and honest in the relationships and romance blossomed.
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When you start hanging out with someone who is not your traditional type, who intrigues you, invite like into your heart. Do you like who he is? Do you like yourself around him? Do you like experiencing the same things in life as he does? Are you so in like with him that he is one of your favorite people to be around? If you answer a resounding yes to all of these questions, you may be falling into like. And don’t be surprised if love follows.
Adapted from He’s Just Not Your Type (and That’s a Good Thing)