What is love anyway

So the bf and I are sitting on the couch. He asks me if you can know someone loves you just by what they do or how they behave towards you. And I think, of course, but being ever careful to random thoughts that seem to come out of no where, pause and ask. “…why do you ask.” After nearly eight years together I should know when I am about to fall into a trap versus his brain firing-off. Fortunately this was neither – he was responding to a friends of his Valentine’s Day post. The BF asserted that “love” is a “feeling” and that actions mean nothing if you don’t have that feeling. Did someone hear that tree fall in the forest? Yes, we were about to wade into the great mind body debate and I was just not going to go there.

All of this makes me think back to a time when people married out of convenience or duty and over the year bonded over something we would call love. Can we really love someone at first sight? I think possibly the bf would say he fell in love with me the moment we met and it took me a year to fall in love with him. That first day there was something about him that I definitely was intrigued by,but maybe that was just his feeling for me that I read. I think he was trying to show it and thinking back – I felt it. As we walked out of the coffee shop – and made the chit chat that people on an exploratory “coffee date” do, I tapped his arm and said that I wanted to see him again – and was clear that I don’t play games. He was caught off guard and stoic. In some ways he still is.