Love is difficult to describe and define, especially if you haven’t experienced healthy love before. Maybe love feels like a mystery, or you’ve only been hurt by falling in love. If you’ve never experienced lasting love, you might wonder, “What does real love feel like?”

One of the reasons people struggle in love is because they expect love to just happen when it’s meant to be. Or if you’ve experienced a lot of heartbreak you might wonder if you’ve ever felt real love. Love may feel rare or unique, but it’s one of the most natural feelings in the world.

Unfortunately if your expectation of real love comes from movies, poetry, or pop music, it’s easy to understand why you’d be confused. Real love isn’t something that just happens to you. It is part of human nature and can be cultivated and created.

The first step to understanding real love is to discover how your past experiences have led you to believe that love is a mystery and can’t be understood.

You Learned About Love At A Very Young Age

Many people grew up in a family dynamic where healthy love was not modeled, so they don’t have a guidance system inside of them to show them how to create it.

Your GPS for love was created at a very young age in your family of origin, and unless you’ve done a lot of therapy and personal growth to change it, it’s still guiding your choices and behaviors for giving and receiving love.

This internal guidance, system, Your Love Imprint®, is your subconscious program that highlights people who are familiar to the energetic dynamic of your family of origin. This system even determines who you find attractive because the subconscious mind highlights what is familiar to you.

In essence, your childhood wounds from your family of origin are driving your choices in love. The adult version of you isn’t selecting a partner, but rather the little child part of you who’s deciding the kind of person that you’re drawn to.

To answer the question, “What does real love feel like?” start by examining your relationship history and look for recurring patterns.

What Does Love Feel Like To You?

Reflect on your past crushes, attractions, and relationships. By examining the physical sensations in your body you can gain insight into your emotional patterns in love.

How did you know that you were falling for someone? What did it feel like in your body? Did it affect your ability to focus or concentrate on your daily tasks? Did you find yourself obsessively thinking about a crush?

Maybe you never felt safe enough to give your heart to someone. The thought of allowing yourself to fall in love was scary or overwhelming. Or maybe you got caught up feeling overwhelmed by the feelings. Perhaps you would obsess about a person who didn’t return your affection and you got stuck on the one that got away.

Evaluating what love feels like to you will give you insight into Your Love Imprint and how it’s motivating your choices to seek love or to avoid it at all costs. A love imprint match occurs when the person you’re attracted to is an energetic match to your wounds from childhood.

A love imprint match is like a false positive. It plays out the familiar dynamic you experienced as a child. For example, if you didn’t feel seen or heard, or that your needs didn’t matter, that’s what you’ll experience in the relationship. (Insert your particular wounding from your family of origin.)

What does real love feel like? Rather than matching your childhood wounds, you’ll feel satisfied in love.

Forgiveness Is The Path To Real Love

Most people who struggle to find lasting love are clear on what they do not want. The trouble is that what you desire isn’t the opposite of what you want to avoid. You can’t create the opposite of what you don’t want because you can’t manifest from lack.

Getting clear on your heart’s desire will clear the path for you to be able to create it. And to do this, you first want to do the work of healing and forgiving the past. Start with forgiving yourself for any mistakes you made in your past relationships. Then do the work to forgive the people who’ve hurt you.

Finally, you’ll want to forgive your parents for their limitations that left you feeling unloved. This is where the real work is. As a little child, you took full responsibility for your parents’ behavior (or whoever raised you).

Every child does this as you didn’t have the capacity to say, “Gee mom, this is bad parenting, what I really need right now is for you to give me a hug and tell me everything is going to be all right.”

Being a parent is the toughest job there is, so it’s best to avoid getting stuck in blame for their deficiencies. You made decisions about yourself and the world based on your parents’ behavior and those decisions don’t have to be set in stone.

Your strategies for giving and receiving love are based upon those decisions that you made as a little child who didn’t know how the world worked yet and before your sense of self was fully formed.

Forgiving your parents (or whoever raised you) allows you to begin the process of healing these wounds.

Once you clear out the negative emotions associated with love from the past, you can begin to ask yourself how you want your soulmate relationship to function. Without inserting a particular person, no face, no details of the person, focus on the kind of relationship that would make your heart sing.

What does real love feel like? Everyone has their unique idea of how their ideal relationship should function, but there are some common qualities when it comes to love.

What Does Real Love Feel Like?

1. Real Love Has Staying Power

When you think about your ideal relationship and how it functions, it’s important to also think of how you would feel over time with an ideal partner. It will feel different than other experiences you’ve had. You’ll likely be more clear-headed and the feelings you have will not be so all-consuming or confusing.

You won’t always feel “in love,” but you’ll be able to rekindle those feelings over and over again. The infatuation that comes with first meeting, dating, and getting to know someone is the gas that goes into your relationship tank. Falling in love is an important stage for love to last.

Remember sex is instinctual, however, long-term monogamous relationships are not. Marriage is a social construct that many people feel is unnecessary. Whether a marriage is part of your goals or not, learning to create a lasting, loving partnership is one way to thrive in life.

Loving someone means that you enjoy spending time with them, but it’s much more because love means that you can overlook temporary frustrations for the longer-term benefits of being with a life partner.

Real love is long-lasting and satisfying. Even though you have differences and disagreements, you’re committed to making it work together so that your love lasts.

What does real love feel like? It feels like it will last a lifetime.

2. Love Feels Like Freedom

One of the contradictions of committing to one person is that it gives you so much freedom in your life. Since you no longer feel the worry and angst of the search for love, it frees you up to focus on other areas of your life.

Love and freedom are also part of any successful relationship. By promising to love and cherish your partner no matter what, you give them the freedom to be themself. Love doesn’t ask for the other person to change. It accepts someone for who they are, warts and all.

When you’re in it to win it with an ideal partner you can give them the benefit of the doubt. You’ll both have good days and bad days, and your soulmate will be a human being who will make mistakes.

What does real love feel like? It feels like the freedom to be yourself and to accept your partner as is.

3. Love Is Risky

Another contradiction built into real love is its inherent riskiness. Even though the two of you made a commitment to each other, it can still feel risky to keep your heart open with your partner.

Taking the risk to choose love daily means that your relationship will never get stale. You will never drift apart. Instead, you’ll lean into your differences and your conflicts allowing the love between you to grow more deeply.

There’s a comfort that comes with choosing the same person to love over and over again despite the temporary circumstances that show up as tiny annoyances.

What does real love feel like? It feels like taking a risk every day to keep your heart open and loving.

4. Love Is Patient And Kind

Part of being human is to feel the full range of human emotions. You’ll have moments with your beloved of being impatient or even unkind. It’s part of being human to accept that you are imperfect.

Still, love is patient and kind despite your impatience and frustration. Choosing to love someone means that you take responsibility for your outbursts and clean them up rather than letting them fester.

Choosing to love another person means you will choose to be more patient and kind with your partner and also with yourself. You’ve both earned the benefit of the doubt with each other and you’re willing to give each other grace.

What does real love feel like? It feels like the patience and kindness to love each other anyway, even when life gets the best of you.

5. Love Is Trusting

Real love means that you’ve taken the time to get to know the person you’ve committed to and that person has earned your trust. Trust is not something that you give to a stranger you’ve just met.

Many people make the mistake of giving the benefit of the doubt to someone they’ve just met because they feel all these good feelings. Just because someone makes you feel good doesn’t mean that they’ve earned your trust.

Trust is earned over time as your partner proves that their intentions and desires with you are trustworthy. Once proven, that trust is given freely.

What does real love feel like? It feels like being able to trust the person sitting across from you, and knowing you can trust in their good intentions.

6. Ultimately, Love Gives You Roots And Wings

Real love is grounding, and it’s also expansive. It gives you deep roots to bring you the feeling that you’re on solid ground. You can stand tall and confident with the support of your soulmate.

At the same time love gives you wings to feel like you could fly to the moon.

What does real love feel like? It’s the feeling of being grounded and present here on planet earth combined with the feeling that you could fly among the stars.

Are you curious about how you can create your own roots and wings? Join us for a Soulmate Strategy Session and we can guide you to create your lasting, loving partnership.