Is it love or longing? Pleasure or relief? Craving or desire?

Let's make a few distinctions.

The more and more I connect with myself- and listen to what I’m feeling and notice how my sensations rest so differently in my body, the more and more I’m learning to distinguish between different experiences. I am a fan of this.

Two sensations I’ve thought about for a long time are yearning and love. Learning to differentiate has been a rewarding challenge. C.S. Lewis describes these two (I think it is in his book: Four Loves). He differentiates between the intense sensation of pleading for someone to love you, and the stable soft sense that comes when you love them.

In one of my jobs this week, we started talking about limerence.

Limerence is a state of involuntary obsession with another person. The experience of limerence is different from love or lust in that it is based on the uncertainty that the person you desire, called the “limerent object” in the literature, also desires you.