How to differentiate between love and friendship: 4 tips

Friendship is also a type of love, although this affective bond is not like the one that is at the base of couple relationships, traditionally associated with romantic love, which we normally consider the form of “love” default.

However, the field of emotions is almost always complex and difficult to predict. Having a realistic understanding of our own feelings is an art, and achieving it is the exception, not the rule. That's why, There are those who doubt when it comes to differentiating between love and friendship. We will talk about this topic in the following lines.

• Related article: "The 4 types of love: what different kinds of love are there?"

Differentiate love from friendship: how to know what I feel?

The first thing to understand when attempting to distinguish between friendship affection and romantic love is that Both experiences are mediated by the way in which our culture has influenced our way of being, thinking and acting. feel.

This means, among other things, that what you feel does not emerge from your encrypted body in clearly separated categories. from each other, just as we might expect if emotions were like the elements of a table periodic. Part of what we feel is how we interpret it, so concerns and beliefs about what we are experiencing

affect, in practice, that emotion.

Part of the difficulty in distinguishing between love and friendship is, then, knowing how to distinguish between what that person makes us feel and what makes us feel the experience of knowing that we are developing an affective bond whose nature we still have to understand. The expectations that the fact of feeling something for someone generates in us they play a role in how we want to relate to them and how that person reacts if we interact with them.

That being said, let's see several tips on what to do to distinguish between love and friendship.

1. Is there chemistry in intimacy?

Intimacy is a key aspect of romantic relationships. However, it should not be confused with sexual connection. Asexual people are not by definition deprived of the experience of loving, but it is true that they do not feel a very intense sexual connection towards someone in particular.

This chemistry in the typical intimacy of love, well, in most cases it also affects the sexual, but it is not limited to this and is present in many other ways of relating physically: hugs, kisses, caresses, mutual care… Normally, if what there is is friendship, a large part of these experiences are not seen as something necessary, although there are always exceptions.

• You may be interested in: "The 7 myths of romantic love"

2. Is there a willingness to compromise?

In love relationships, the people involved tend to want to establish a minimum commitment. Therefore, if some time passes without the other person having tried to contact them, for example, disappointment and sadness appear.

This commitment is not equivalent to what has traditionally been considered "fidelity" based on a monogamous model, but rather has to do with the broader meaning of word: make sacrifices and agreements to keep the bond alive and make it have its place in the future, instead of leaving everything to improvisation or meetings sporadic A person who sees an unjustified imposition in this idea of ​​basing her relationship with the other on a certain degree of commitment, will probably be feeling friendship, and not conventional love.

3. Make sure pity doesn't play a part

There are couple relationships that begin because one of its members feels a mixture of affection and compassion for a person whom she considers helpless and alone. This experience, although based on compassion, creates obvious problems. On the one hand, it perpetuates the idea that a person is alone unless they have a partner with whom they are linked by a romantic love bond, which is clearly wrong, and on the other, makes it easier for the other to generate wrong expectations.

Therefore, another of the necessary but not sufficient conditions to distinguish between friendship and love is make sure that time and activities spent together with that person are not based on pity. For example, we can carry out small experiments based on the imagination, such as imagining that this person begins to date another with whom it is clear that there is a connection of reciprocated love. How does that make us feel? If the answer has something to do with relief, it may very well be friendship..

4. Analyze the intensity of the emotion

Normally, friendships are seen as something flexible, that can stop being on the scene for a while and, a while later, reappear. However, in the case of love, the emotion is usually so intense that the idea of ​​interrupting the relationship even temporarily is experienced in a dramatic way and clearly painful, and feeling a strong duel for this loss.

The emotions felt through love are too intense for us to be comfortable with the experience of not knowing if that person will continue to be there for us tomorrow.

This "rigidity" in the way we assess whether or not our expectations are being met is another of the keys that can help us distinguish between friendship and love.