What Love is Not

What Love is Not

– A Life Lesson on Attachment, Infatuation and Lust

He loves me. He loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not.  The notion of love can be so confusing.  Nonetheless, many people throw the word around without regard for its true meaning.

In an environment where the word love is used to describe feelings of lust, attachment, and infatuation, you may be wondering how anyone can possibly identify pure love. The easiest way is to first identify what love is not.
Beware of Attachment


Love is unconditional; whereas, attachment comes with many conditions.  When you’re attached, you may require a person to remain accessible at all times, to meet your expectations, to provide you with physical pleasures, to tell you what you need to hear, “fix” their flaws, or to change their ways.  When they oblige, you may feel that they are “showing their love.”

However, when that person is no longer meeting the conditions, you feel distraught or claim to be “falling out of love.”  This isn’t really falling out of love, because love exists despite circumstances.  Instead, this is the typical dissatisfaction that stems from unhealthy relationship attachment.

This is not an issue that is limited to romantic relationships, as it often shows up in relations with family, friends, and others that are close to us.

Attachment creates a sense of anxiety about what is to come—a fear that something is going wrong or will go wrong. Whereas the purity of love allows peace of mind with what is.

Here are a few examples in case you’re not sure how to identify attachment disguised as love:

The feeling that you can’t live without someone

Feelings of jealousy, anxiety, or