We would be remiss not to mention what love is not, before diving into how to make someone fall in love with you. The very nature of this question begs another one: Why are you trying to make someone fall in love with you?
As Page tells mbg, it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in winning someone’s approval, while simultaneously abandoning your own needs or even sense of self. “The degree to which you hyper-focus on whether someone likes you is the degree to which you will self abandon,” he says, adding that it’s far more important to get clear on how this person actually makes you feel.
“Even though you might be saying, ‘Oh, they check all the boxes and I’m super interested,’ maybe you realize you feel cold inside when you’re around them, like you have to grab them because they’re not really available,” he explains.
Page adds that this line of thinking can majorly trigger abandonment wounds, and we’re likely to get swept up in an “attraction of deprivation,” in which someone’s unavailability becomes addictive fuel for our own abandonment issues. “It’s an incredibly addictive and compulsive kind of attraction that all of us are programmed to be sensitive and vulnerable to,” he says.
This compulsion goes hand in hand with limerence, or a romantic infatuation marked by feelings of obsession and fantastical longing. As licensed marriage and family therapist Holly Richmond, Ph.D., LMFT, previously explained to mbg, limerence is the combination of hormones, endorphins, and emotional prioritization that occur in the initial stages of a relationship, but it doesn’t necessarily equate to or lead to wholehearted, long-term love. That’s not to say it won’t eventually evolve, but if you’re putting this person on a pedestal and trying to force love out of them, you are likely not seeing them clearly in the first place. Which—you guessed it—is not real love.
And lastly, although lust (or sexual desire) is a component of love, things can get tricky if lust levels are high. Love and lust are easy to confuse because they actually activate similar neural pathways2 in the brain that are involved in things like goal-directed behavior, happiness, reward, and addiction. So, it’s important to determine whether you’re actually dealing with actual love—or just lust by itself. (We’ve got a full guide on how to tell the difference between love and lust that should help you with that.)
Sarah Regan
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