When Attraction Feels Like Love

I often find myself thinking about how many things we’ve learned to call “love,” simply because we didn’t have another word available at the time.
Excitement.
Attraction.
Emotion.
The deep sense of relief when someone looks at us and, for a moment, we feel a little less alone.
Up close, all of these can look like love. And sometimes, they are its first touch. But they are not the same thing.

Perhaps because we often confuse what activates us with what sustains us. What soothes us with what recognizes who we are. And what destabilizes us with what truly connects us.

Some time ago, I read a sentence that stayed with me, perhaps because it wasn’t romantic at all:
Love is an emergent phenomenon that arises when two systems repeatedly choose to remain in proximity, while fully free to leave.

If we set aside the technical language, what it says is simple.
Love is not that you can’t leave.
It’s that you can — and still choose to stay.

That alone changes a lot. Because if we’re honest, people rarely enter relationships seeking connection. They enter seeking relief.

Relief from loneliness.
Relief from uncertainty.
Relief from the weight of having to hold themselves together on their own.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human. The problem begins when we ask a relationship to regulate us, instead of simply accepting us as we are. Over time, it becomes clear that behind many conflicts there isn’t a lack of love, but unmet needs that were never clearly named.

• People need to feel that the other chooses them again and again. Not once. Not just at the beginning. But over time — especially when things become difficult.

• They need safety more than they’re willing to admit, and intensity more than they allow themselves. When one is missing, they tend to chase the other excessively.

• They need to be able to express themselves without being corrected. To say something as it is, without it immediately turning into a problem that needs fixing.

• They need autonomy without abandonment. Freedom that doesn’t feel like distance. Closeness that doesn’t feel like control.

• And perhaps the most overlooked need of all: they need permission to be incomplete.

The relationships that last are not the ones that “complete” us, but the ones in which we don’t have to pretend we are already complete. When these needs aren’t clearly recognized, they’re often covered over by something more intense — something that seems to satisfy them, but in reality blurs them.

This is usually where intensity appears. Passion.
Passion is a temporary state of heightened arousal. It brings us closer, bonds us quickly, creates strong attachments. But at the same time, it reduces our clarity. It isn’t an enemy. It’s a mechanism.

The problem isn’t that it shows up, but that we try to keep it in a place where it doesn’t belong. When it becomes the measure. When we start measuring the value of a relationship by how much it destabilizes us. When uncertainty gets renamed “chemistry,” and instability quietly passes for “depth.”

Then something begins to narrow.
Our attention.
Our judgment.
The field within which we move.

Gradually, reality gives way to a story about what could be — a version of events that feels richer, more charged, more alive than what is actually unfolding. Without quite noticing the shift, we stop asking whether what we’re living truly serves us. Everything narrows to a single concern: how to keep it from slipping away.

This is how we lose ourselves.
Not out of weakness, but out of excessive focus on a single point.

The return doesn’t come through more intensity. It comes through regulation. Through reopening the field.
Through remembering ourselves outside the relationship, so that we can return to it without disappearing inside it.

There comes a point where the picture becomes clear. Not when everything is going well, but when something becomes difficult. If a relationship pulls you away from yourself — from your clarity, from your sense of wholeness — then no matter how intense it is, at some point it will ask for more than you can give without losing yourself.

Love doesn’t require you to abandon yourself in order to exist. It stands beside you as you are, not as you think you should become.

Love doesn’t hold you because you can’t leave.
It holds you precisely because you can.

You can step back, think, doubt, return to yourself — and the relationship remains there. Not as a demand, but as a choice.
When love is present, freedom doesn’t threaten connection.
It deepens it.