Love is a mysterious thing, how can you fall in love with someone you barely know?

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A2A, infatuation feels a lot like love but you shouldn’t mix them up. People use the word love to mean all kinds of things, but you’re doing bad things to your life if you don’t apply these two criteria to situations where you have lots of feelings towards someone else.

First, are the feelings mutual? If you don’t know, then you really need to find out somehow. If you barely know them then you can use nonverbal means to gauge attraction, but you need to switch over to talking and interacting as soon as possible. How a person looks at you is the best way to tell if someone’s attracted to you, if you can feel their eyes searching for you and keeping track of you, that’s the surest sign.

Second, does your relationship work? Are you getting what you need from it? Is the other person getting what they need from it? This is trickier to write about in general because everybody’s different, but typically it’s a “know it when you see it” sort of situation. Relationships are magical little worlds where everything else just falls away when you’re with that other person.

Most relationships have a “honeymoon phase” where just having someone you’re attracted to and who is attracted to you is all that’s needed to make it work. Being lonely sucks and removing loneliness all of a sudden is a heady and breathtaking experience. But depending on how lonely you were before, the honeymoon phase is masking some really deep differences you have with your partner.

How you guys work through those differences is what is really meant by “having a working relationship.” It’s less about the destination and more about the ebb and flow of solving problems together and learning about yourselves and each other.

The feeling of being in love with someone you barely know is your brain playing tricks on you. Loneliness sucks so much that our brains conspire against us to alleviate it. You only really know after you been together for a long enough time to know whether you guys can work together. And until you know, you don’t know.