10 Definitive Ways To Tell You’re In Love With The Right Someone
A writer details the 10 signs when a man truly knows he's in love with a woman.
Falling in love is one of the most exciting, rewarding and scariest things you could ever do.
Once you’re in love with someone, it’s hard to remember how you lived without him or her. Of course, you were alive before
you met this person, but you really didn’t start “living” until the two of you met.
I remember when I first fell in love with my girlfriend; it was a very scary feeling, as I had managed to elude love for
the entirety of my life before her. I specifically remember the transition from when I liked Vanessa to when I began to love her.
Vanessa went from being someone who made me smile to being the greatest catalyst of the happiness and joy in my life. She
went from a gorgeous girl I met to the most beautiful girl I know. She went from my crush to the love of my life.
Everyone experiences love differently, and at different times. Even the meaning of love is extremely subjective, but I say
for certain that anyone who’s experienced it knows it’s the best feeling ever.
Here are 10 ways to know if you might be in love — rather than in like — with someone:
1. The best part of your day
As Childish Gambino said, “When I’m alone, I’d rather be with you.” Seeing my girlfriend is always the highlight of my
day. If you really love someone, you never truly get tired of him or her.
No matter how great your day might be going, your special person will make it better. When you just like someone, he or
she might make your day better, but probably isn’t the best part.
2. The first person you think about
Your love will be the first person you think about when you wake up and the last person you think about before you go to
sleep. When something good happens to you, this is the first person you want to tell.
When something bad happens to you, you look to this person for support.
3. Prioritize above your own needs
Love is selfless. I was the most important person in my world until I met my girlfriend. Once I fell in love with her, her
needs became much more important than my own.
This is just how love is. Your needs always seem trivial in comparison to your significant other’s needs.
4. You’d do anything
If I tried to construct a list of things I wouldn’t do for my girlfriend, the list would be pretty empty. When you’re in
love with someone, you do whatever you can to make the person happy.
When you like someone, you may feel like there is a lot you would do for the person, but you have your limits. True love
knows no limits.
5. You are never afraid to express your feelings in public
I have this semi-bad habit of telling the world how in love I am with my girlfriend.
When you’re truly in love, you want everyone to know. You are not bashful about your feelings by any means. When you like
someone, there is a lot of holding back on how you feel.
6. You love the imperfections
My girlfriend is the most beautiful girl I know, but she does have some imperfections. But, to me, they’re not
imperfections — they’re unique qualities and things I love.
When I tease her about them, she thinks I am making fun of her, but I am truly just admiring them. Love is the ability to
know and accept someone’s faults.
You may know the imperfections of a person you like, but having the capacity to embrace them likely won’t happen unless
you fall in love.
7. You think long-term
When you’re in love with someone, it’s hard to imagine a future without the person in it. For this reason, you will think
long-term about how you can build a life with this person.
You won’t give in to short-term temptations that might mess up your long-term goals. When you just like someone, thinking
long-term can be pretty scary.
8. You become a better person
No one is perfect; we all have room for improvement. But, being in love will force you to work on these things.
You want to become the best version of yourself for the person you love. I am a better person now than I was before I met
my girlfriend.
9. Your feelings are unconditional
When you love someone unconditionally, it means that your love knows no conditions and is absolute. I don’t actually like
the term “unconditional love” because I think it’s redundant — I believe all true love is unconditional.
When you like someone, your feelings change depending on the condition.
10. Your love is your best friend
Sometime along the way, my girlfriend became my best friend. I believe this to be true for most people who fall in
love.
Your significant other becomes your partner in crime. You feel like, together, you can take on the world.
Originally appeared at Elite Daily
By Catherine Guthrie
When Amy Buttell separated from her husband in 2005, her anxiety spiked off the charts. A suddenly single mother, Buttell
didn’t have a lot of money to throw around. Still, in the wake of her marital upheaval, she made massage a priority. It helped her weather the storm, she says, and today, she still finds
that getting one or two massages a month helps keep stress at bay. And that helps her defend against physiological tension, too.
“When I’m anxious, I feel all clenched up,” says the 49-year-old marketing communications director from Erie, Pa. “My
massage therapist untangles my knots.” Like many people, Buttell values not only the hands-on healing but also the opportunity to power down her brain and nervous system for an hour or so. “Even
if I’m short on money,” she says, “I find a way to make it happen.”
Buttell is not alone. Despite massage’s reputation as a self-indulgent luxury, an increasing number of people are
embracing it — not just as a “spa treatment,” but as a powerful therapeutic tool.
Americans currently log more than 114 million trips to massage therapists every year. Massage therapists are the
second most visited complementary and alternative medicine providers behind chiropractors. All told, Americans spend up to $11 billion a year on massage. And statistics from the American Massage
Therapy Association project that over the next five years, that number is likely to grow considerably.
What we’re getting for our money, whether we realize it or not, is an access code of sorts — a healing key capable of
opening the body’s stickiest locks.
Scrunching our shoulders, craning our necks, sitting for hours, driving in rush-hour traffic — such mundane activities
can create patterns of muscle tension (referred to as “holding”) in the body. And when muscles are chronically tense or tweaked, it can have a nasty effect on both our bodies and our
minds.
Persistent musculoskeletal tension can restrict blood circulation and nutrient supplies to the body’s organs and
tissues. As the weblike connective tissue (fascia) that envelops the muscles gets increasingly dense and less mobile, it can negatively affect posture and breathing. The experience of low-grade,
habitual tension can contribute to chronic hormonal, biochemical and neurological problems of all kinds.
Massage interrupts such stress-inducing patterns, and helps nudge the body back into a natural state of
balance.
So what is massage, exactly? Scientists who study its health benefits often use the therapy’s broadest definition:
“The manipulation of soft tissue for the purpose of producing physiological effects.”
That clinical definition hardly does massage justice, though. So read on to find out more about the subtleties of
various types of massage, and the powerful healing potential they might hold for you.
Alleviate Anxiety
In conventional medicine, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies are the gold standard. But massage and most other
forms of bodywork don’t lend themselves well to such studies. Therefore, scientific “proof,” both for massage’s efficacy and its means of function, runs a little thin. But convincing clinical
evidence is accumulating.
For example, in 2004, Christopher Moyer, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, published a
meta-analysis on massage therapy research and found that, on average, research subjects who received massage had a lower level of anxiety than those who did not.
“My research consistently finds that massage does have an impact on anxiety,” says Moyer. “We don’t know exactly why,
but people who get massage have less anxiety afterward.”
One popular explanation is that massage lowers the body’s levels of cortisol, the hormone notorious for triggering the
body’s fight-or-flight response. “No matter how we measure cortisol — in saliva or urine — or how often, we always find that massage has a beneficial effect,” says Tiffany Field, PhD, a
researcher at the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.
Although Moyer is yet to be convinced of the cortisol connection, both he and Field agree that massage is potentially
very therapeutic for what’s known as “state” anxiety. Unlike generalized anxiety disorders, state anxiety is a reaction to something you can pinpoint, such as a troubling or traumatic event,
circumstance, or setting.
Although more research is needed, says Moyer, “some experts posit that the reported alleviation of state anxiety could
be a result of something as simple as the social and psychological environment where massage takes place.”
Relieve Lower-Back Pain
Aside from stress, if there’s one thing that drives people to the massage table in droves, it’s pain. Especially
lower-back pain, which up to 85 percent of Americans experience at some point during their lives.
In 2008, the Cochrane Collaboration (a global, independent, nonprofit organization that reviews the usefulness of
healthcare interventions) published an examination of the evidence linking massage to relieving lower-back pain. Reviewing 13 clinical trials, they found massage to be a promising
treatment.
“Physical pain is like the alarm system of a house,” says Andrea Furlan, PhD, a clinical epidemiologist who
specializes in massage at the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto. “With acute pain, like a burn or a broken bone, the pain signal indicates something is wrong. But, if you have pain every
day, like chronic back pain, the alarm is malfunctioning. Massage may not be able to turn off the alarm, but it can lower the volume.”
Theories abound on how massage interrupts the body’s pain loop. One of the oldest and most well-regarded explanations
is called the gate-control theory. Proponents surmise that pain signals to the brain are muffled by competing stimuli. More specifically, pain travels on small-diameter nerve fibers, while
massage stimulates large-diameter ones. Larger nerve fibers relay messages to the brain faster than smaller ones. In essence, says Furlan, the sensation of the massage “wins” over the sensation
of pain.
One word of advice from fitness experts, though: You’ll get more lasting, long-term relief of lower-back pain by
supplementing massage with isometric core exercises, such as planks, that focus on strengthening the muscles that support and guide the spine’s movements.
Soothe Tension Headaches
Tension leads to headaches, so it follows that massage would help ease them. And for many, trigger-point therapy can
prove particularly effective.
“A trigger point is an area of tightly contracted muscle tissue,” says Albert Moraska, PhD, a researcher focused on
complementary medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver. “Trigger points in the shoulder and neck refer [relay] pain to the head. By reducing the activity of trigger points, we can reduce
headaches.”
Moraska’s work, funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, explores how massaging the
neck and shoulders can ease tension-type headaches. “We think massage can disrupt trigger points by forcing apart the tightly contracted sarcomeres (proteins responsible for contraction) within
the muscle cells; as a result, the cells relax and subsequently muscle tension dissipates.”
Restore Deep Sleep
Roughly one in five Americans suffers from sleep deprivation, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
That’s a problem, because lack of sleep alters the body’s biochemistry, making it more vulnerable to inflammation and lowered immunity, and more sensitive to pain.
“The relationship between pain and sleep deprivation is a vicious cycle,” says Tiffany Field. “Your body doesn’t get
the rest it needs to heal.”
Although studies of massage therapy and sleep quality are few, the findings suggest that massage can promote deeper,
less disturbed sleep, especially in people with painful chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia. Massage therapy indirectly promotes good sleep by relieving pain and encouraging
relaxation.
Because massage therapy stimulates the body’s parasympathetic “rest-and-relax” nervous system (the opposite of its
sympathetic “fight-or-flight” response), it counters both physical and mental stresses — giving you a better shot at enjoying the sleep you need to repair tissue during the
night and to cope better during the day.
Reduce Symptoms of Depression
It may seem surprising that physically manipulating the body can help counter a malady we associate with the brain.
But, in his oft-cited 2004 review, Christopher Moyer found that depression is particularly responsive to massage.
The average research subject who received massage had a level of depression that was lower than 73 percent of those
who did not. These findings are on par with more conventional approaches to treating depression, including psychotherapy.
Field’s research on depression shows that massage boosts the body’s natural levels of serotonin, a substance that
works “much like Prozac” in the brain. Her studies show that massage also encourages the brain to release the neurotransmitter dopamine, a mood enhancer, as well as oxytocin, a hormone that
generates feelings of contentment.
While the exact mechanisms are unclear, it seems evident that a good massage has a variety of positive psychological
implications as well, from receiving nurturing touch from another person, anticipating that the experience will be beneficial, or feeling empathy from the therapist.
Lower Blood Pressure
Given how positively it affects the rest of the body and mind, and how well it moderates stress, it probably comes as
no surprise that massage therapy can also benefit the heart — in part by reducing blood pressure. In his meta-analysis, Moyer found that massage significantly lowers blood pressure, at least
temporarily.
He notes that the findings are consistent with the theory that massage can trigger the body’s parasympathetic nervous
system, which helps prompt the body to return to biochemical balance and emotional ease after enduring a stressful event.
But perhaps the bigger takeaway here is that massage can help unlock the body’s healing potential not by any one
means, but rather by many. As epidemiologist Andrea Furlan points out, “Well before drugs or surgical procedures were developed, people used massage to treat almost everything.” Still, today, she
notes, “when we get hurt, our first instinct is to rub.”
Amy Buttell, for one, doesn’t need any more evidence than her own transformation. “I don’t know if it’s the touch, the
warm table, or the fact that I get to turn my phone off for an hour, but I do know that massage is worth every penny.”
Catherine Guthrie is an Indiana-based
health writer and a regular contributor to ExperienceLife.com
