Make a man fall in love with you?

Of course it’s a complete misnomer – “how to make a man fall in love with you”! The reality is, as you already know, that you can’t actually make anybody fall in love with you. After all, how could you get control of somebody’s mind and change their viewpoint of something as subtle and complicated as love?

But of course there are hundreds if not thousands of websites out on the Internet all designed to offer information on how to make a man love you or how to make a man fall in love with you.

So why is it that I say you can’t make anybody fall in love with you?

Surely, the presence of so many Internet sites is a strong indication that actually there must be something to the techniques which these websites claim will give you instant adoration and love?

I don’t know, because I haven’t read any of them, but what I do know is that you can’t expect to be able to influence somebody’s feelings in an area as tender and precious to the human psyche as love.

Of course what you can do is to influence how someone feels about you by behaving in different ways.

So, if you were to engage in behavior which helped somebody to see that you were very nice and friendly, they might well begin to like you.

In fact, there are plenty of things you can do which really will make somebody like you. And as you may well already know, liking is a very sound basis for growing your relationship into love naturally!

So you might think that this is simply playing with words. You may think that when people talk about techniques to make a man love you, and I say that there aren’t any such techniques, but there are plenty of techniques which can make a man like you, I am splitting hairs.

women require sexual pleasure – and why wouldn’t they?

Liking or loving – you decide!

But I do believe that’s true – liking and loving really are two separate emotions.

To like somebody means to feel appreciation or affection or sense of warmth towards them. To love somebody means to have a relationship with them whereby they are really precious to you, and what happens to them really matters to you.

You might be wondering whether or not loving someone is just a more intense version of liking, whether it’s simply liking “magnified”? When you look at definitions of liking and loving, you can see that the difference clearly centres on certain qualities.

Zick Rubin, one of the first social psychologists who studied love seriously, developed what he called liking and loving scales.

So in Rubin’s point of view, we appreciate people when we like them: we like their company, we like their point of view, we like to spend time with them.

Rubin distinguished this level of liking from love by suggesting that love is a much deeper emotion.

Now what does this mean? One thing that it means is the connection includes a desire for physical contact and intimacy, and perhaps also caring about another person’s needs as though they were your own.

Rubin talked about levels of romantic love – I think he mentioned five levels of romantic love, from affection through to infatuation and passion.

Of course it’s inevitable that in a field so intensely related to human interaction, many social psychologists have tried to define love and liking, but unfortunately they’ve done it in different ways.

For example, social psychologist Elaine Hatfield made a distinction between only two types of love which she called companionate love and passionate love.

Companionate love, she said, was based more on mutual respect, caring and affection whereas passionate love was something more intense and sexually based.

Needless to say, as you might’ve observed in your own relationships, passionate love can turn into companionate love as time goes by.

It could be that as it can Rubin’s definition of love is more helpful than it might appear at first sight, because he spoke of romantic love quite specifically.But these are really grey areas, with unspecific definitions and to be honest, somewhat unhelpful if you’re trying to decide whether you love or like somebody. Even more unhelpful if you are trying to make a man love you! Click here for more information on this.

He said that it was based on three elements:

• Attachment, which is the need to be cared for and to be with the other person.
• Caring, which is about valuing the other person’s happiness as much as your own.
• And finally, intimacy, which is about sharing your most intimate and private thoughts with the other person.

He also investigated how it might be possible to identify how much somebody was feeling romantic love.

Certain behaviors seem to be key here. For example, one of the things that he found was that if people are deeply in love they spend a lot more time gazing into each other’s eyes.

When people are not so deeply in love, or only a little bit in love –  well, they do not spend so much time looking into each other’s eyes. (And indeed this is one way in which you may be able to induce a feeling of greater liking in a man who you wish to have love you: look deeply into his eyes, a lot! Find out more about this here.)

Men come far too quickly for most women to get sexual pleasure.

 

Romantic love will always turn sexual if allowed the opportunity for expression.

While there are behavioral characteristics like this which can help us identify liking and loving, the real problem is that love is an ephemeral concept, both emotionally and intellectually.

It’s therefore difficult to define, and even more difficult to measure.

Yet the interesting thing is that we all know when we are in love with somebody! So perhaps, at the end of the day, it’s better to leave love as a felt experience rather than see it as something to be scientifically deconstructed.