Everyone has questioned whether the feeling they have towards their significant other is either love or lust. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference, especially at the start of a relationship. Luckily for us, some researchers have done some digging, and can tell if your partner loves or lusts you.
Students at the University of Geneva, were part of a study that determined eye movement shows exactly what your romantic interest is after. The study showed this, “People tended to visually fixate on the face, especially when they said an image elicited a feeling of romantic love. However, with images that evoked sexual desire, the subjects’ eyes moved from the face to fixate on the rest of the body. The effect was found for male and female participants” (Ingmire, 2014). So now you can tell that if you significant other is looking at your face, then he/she is interested in love, but if his/her eyes start to wonder then you know their is no future there, The hope for this study is to help couples when they go to therapy because the clinicians can study the eye movement of the couple.
There are other ways to tell if your partner is looking to rush to the alter with you or not, some of them are if they stay the morning after, and just hit it and quit it. If someone is looking for love then he/she will stay and if your lucky, cook you breakfast in the morning. Also the person you love should want to have a conversation with, meet your family/friends, and spend time together. A person who lusts after you, just wants to spend quality time with you in the sheets and not the streets. A lot of times when we lust after someone, we get a feeling in the pit of our stomachs that something isn’t right, if you ever have that feeling, run with it because it most likely is true. You need to be able to feel comfortable with who your with and be able to trust him/her.
It is hard to tell the difference between love and lust. As we learned in class our intuition is lousy and we can see faults in other people more than we can see faults in ourselves. It is easier to look at someone else’s relationship an tell them what is wrong and what they should do to fix it, but when it comes to our own, its just not that clear. Humans are more prone to looking past their own faults and see themselves as perfect or at least pretty darn close to it. That is why it is hard to tell if the person you are with loves or lusts after you because you don’t want it to be the latter. All the signs can be there but you just don’t want to believe it because if you, it’s a game changer. Just how we learned in class about the millions of galaxies out there and how the Milky Way might collide with one in about 4 billion years, if the milky way can find another galaxy in the 100 billions of them out there, you can surely find someone in this world as well.
Sources:
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/07/17/eye-movements-reveal-difference-between-love-and-lust
http://www.eharmony.com/dating-advice/relationships/is-it-love-or-lust/#.VDRUDvldUy0
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/emotional-freedom/201108/lust-vs-love-do-you-know-the-differenc
I loved reading this blog! I think it is a very interesting topic! Lust and love is always something to think about. I think people of all ages, especially college students, can relate to this in some fashion. Relationships have greatly changed in society today. Chivalry isn’t as prominent, and the days of guys asking girls on dates has vanished. Don’t get me wrong, there are still guys who do this, but not nearly as many. More and more guys are attracted to the body first than the face, but that is just common sense for a guy. It is all part of biology and the genetic makeup of males in general. Here are some tips to know the differences between lust and love! Great blog!
http://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Difference-Between-Love-and-Lust.htm
What a great blog, you even used concepts that we learned in class. I found this very interesting. When thinking about if someone is in love or lust I think of the concepts Andrew taught us (false positive/false negative). Let’s think of the process of trying to figure out if someone lusts after you as an experiment. You draw the hypothesis that they love you. You want them to love you so when you go to test this you overall ignore all the signs and ignore your intuition that they are probably just trying to get you in bed. Let’s say in the end they actually are just lusting after you. In a way that would be a false negative (something is going on, you conclude it is not) ; you thought that something was love but indeed that was not going on. Rather it was lust going on. I really believe in today’s society a lot of people are age no longer are really falling in love like they used to back in the day. In the past people would fall in love at a young age and get married, now our media and technology makes people fall in lust much easier. Like said in a previous comment , I also saw a documentary about the attraction of partners. We are naturally attracted to others by their physical appearance. We are genetically programed this way for we are also programed to eventually create off spring. This attraction helps that idea of creating offspring. This is also the same in animals. Certain smells and appearance of colors of the opposite sex may attract another animal to reproduce. In the end this blog is great in a sense that it opens to much discussion and branches off into many other topics. Check out this story on a girl who struggled with lust , it shows how lust is an issue in todays society (this agrees with my argument) http://www.christianitytoday.com/iyf/hottopics/sexabstinence/one-girls-battle-with-lust.html
I really enjoyed this article, and I love the way you concluded your thoughts with a reference from class today. This is a very interesting concept that I feel a lot of people our age can relate to in some way. Our dating culture has definitely changed from that of previous generations. It’s very uncommon for a guy to meet a girl and then ask her on a date. That’s just not how our age group works. Typically, you meet, you text, and then it can take a few different routes from there. If you do meet up with the other person, you “hang out” (or hook up) not go on a date. However, physical attraction is a crucial part to the relationship. There are a lot of scientific studies on the art of sexual attraction. One time I saw a documentary on the topic and learned that we are naturally interested in certain qualities of the opposite sex that derive from the basic qualifications of what characteristics will produce the best offspring. There are visual and mental aspects, and even scents that we produce when attracting the opposite gender. For example, in the club men are attracted to a scent that all females produce, but females are only attracted to certain males’ scents. It all falls down to the primal biology that composes the human race, and it’s crucial for the continuum of the human race.