Being in love can be a wonderful feeling, but how do you know if it is really love or simply an obsession? True love involves many aspects with trust being the most important. There are many people who defend jealous or even violent actions with claiming that they are in love. The truth is that love is a beautiful, giving and trusting action between two people. Obsession is an action of one person towards another.

Lionel Richie sang about it. Thousands of authors have written stories about it and there are millions of actors in the world who have played in movies about it. So, what IS real love? Every one of us wants to know that we have found true love. We want to feel it to the very core of our being. We begin fantasizing about it when we are just little girls and spend most of our teenage and early adult years searching for it in the faces of every man we date. How then do we really know when we have found real love?

Since the very dawn of time women have questioned real love. In the beginning of a new relationship everything seems perfect. You can’t stop thinking about him, you want to be with him constantly and then, slowly, life begins to invade your newfound happiness. You begin to wonder if you truly love this man that you seem to have been so taken with. You begin to dread seeing him and may even wonder if you want to keep him around at all. So how do you know when it’s really love that you are feeling?

Most women in the world go through life searching for Mr. Right. We fully believe that once we find him our lives will be complete. Like the line in Jerry McGuire - “You complete me”. In order to be complete however, we must first realize what it would take to make us complete. Feeling fulfilled in a relationship may take on many different meanings for different people. We need to understand what we are looking for in the perfect mate before we can recognize whether or not we have found him.

Have you ever heard Frank Sinatra’s song Wives and Lovers? Part of the song advises women to not “send him off with your hair still in curlers. You may not see him again”. Pleasing men has long been the way of women. Now, we aren’t talking about sexual gratification here. We’re talking about the lengths that women go to just to ensure that their men are completely happy. So, why do we do it?