Here it is very important to understand that in love both people are free: free to give to each other.
Anna Ryazanova , an expert on psychology for the online publication BelNovosti, explained how to understand whether it is love or attachment.
Sharing with each other your time, attention, respect, desire to learn together, to help each other. And all this is born easily, there is no internal pain, no feeling of some kind of super-duty, heaviness.
If we talk about attachment, then this is precisely a painful feeling. And here, often, a person – the object of love – is the bearer of certain functions that we need in life.
If this person leaves, then there will be no one to perform these functions. And this is not about the desire to share, but rather about the benefit, the opportunity to close your childhood trauma with this person, the need for care and love.
Attachment can also be easily tested by the impossibility of letting this person go anywhere from you. Even trips to another city or country are equated to a large-scale disaster, often accompanied by hysterics, doubts, suspicions, and claims.
That is, any breakup is experienced emotionally very vividly. Because attachment is selfish, while in love there is more freedom, understanding, respect, trust.
If you imagine that the person is not next to you and if this is attachment, you will miss coffee in the morning, the fact that this person comes in the evening, cooks dinner, you watch a movie together, and in the summer you go somewhere.
You can easily list what you will not have in life, feel a strong longing. But this will be a longing for the functions of a person, and not for him himself, not for the fact that he fills your life with a special meaning, that you have a common goal and movement towards it.
Love is in some special shared beauty, deep respect for each other. And you have a need to respect this person, a need to give to him, to love. And it is not painful, but comes from such deep trepidation, warmth, inner gratitude. And there is no desire to take.
