I will be revealing twelve legitimate tests that can help you discern if you're really in love or not and if what your partner feels for you who is genuine love or just infatuation.

Each of these tests is designed to help you discern and distinguish between love and infatuation.

If your relationship is over 51 percent love by the standard of the test, write an "L" in the margin; if it's 51 percent or more on the infatuation side, put an "I." This isn't a test that you can fail. This is a tool to help you learn and grow in your understanding of the most important part of life, loving another human being.

1. The Test Of Time
Love benefits and grows through time; infatuation ebbs and diminishes with time. Love develops out of relationship and caring and core personal character traits, not our instant impression or perception of another person. Infatuation can explode at any moment, but real love takes time.

So the question:
How long did it take for love to be declared, by you or your partner?

2. The Test of Knowledge
Love grows out of an appraisal of all the known characteristics of the other person.

How much do you know about this person?

I'm amazed how often couples who are well into their relationships display a lack of basic knowledge about each other. Unfortunately, most couples seldom have shared goals, shared vision, or shared purposes for where they expect to go together in their relationship or marriage.

Infatuation is happy to know very little. Love longs to know well.
Love wants to study the other person's needs, desires, dreams, and hopes because it wants to do everything to make them a reality. Love is interested, not in what it can get, but in what it can give.

The development of a relationship ought to be like an undergraduate degree in which the other person becomes a multifaceted and fascinating study. Marriage, then, becomes a lifelong pursuit of a Ph.D. in knowing and understanding your spouse.

Do you lack a desire to get to know this person? Does this person lack an interest in getting to know you? Are you even interested in this person getting to know you?
Are you simply satisfied with a person just telling you they love you?
If you are in a relationship how much of your partner's personality and purpose do you know and how much of yours do they know?

Have you decided how you can best help him or her achieve that goal or dream?
After answering the questions in this test can you really say you both love each other or is it just infatuation?

Infatuation quickly decides it knows everything it needs to know. Genuine love creates an atmosphere of such interest that the other person opens like a flower.

3. The Test Of Focus
Genuine love is other-person centered. Infatuation is self centered. You know what infatuated people are all caught up with? Themselves.


In your most important relationships, to what degree is your attention focused on what you are receiving from them and to what degree is your attention focused on meeting the other's needs?

I have met people whose bosses at work, ministers at their church, even their parents, siblings, relatives and friends who say at some point they love them but instead focus their attention on what they will receive or get from these people. This has affected these people's understanding of love.

Next personal evaluation: Do you think about how you're going to look and feel in the relationship,
or about what you can do to make that person look and feel great?


4. The Test Of Singularity
Genuine love is focused on only one person. An infatuated individual may be "in love" with two or more persons simultaneously.

Do you find your self feeling the same way towards others or is your partner distracted by others?

5. The Test Of Security
Genuine love requires and fosters a sense of security and feelings of trust.
Security grows and flows out of deep awareness of the other person's character, values, and track record. You know who he or she really is. And when you know who they really are, you trust them. You are not jealous because you know their heart is yours. Jealousy is often a sign of a lack of trust, and a lack of trust is a sign of infatuation in real life, especially excess unnecessary jealousy.

How insecure and jealous are you or your partner in that relationship?

6. The Test Of Work
An individual in love works for the other person, for his or her mutual benefit. By contrast, an infatuated person loses his or her ambition, appetite, and interests in everyday affairs. A woman in love may study to make her husband proud. A man in love may have his ambitions spurred on by planning and saving for the future together. Partners in genuine love may daydream about the potential of their relationship, but their daydreams are reasonably attained. People in infatuation often daydream of unrealistic objectives and ideals that neither they nor their partner could ever actually attain.

Infatuation lives off the relationship; love builds into the relationship.

Are you working for you both benefit as contrast to being self centered, or have you lost interest in your commitments and concentration in your daily life?

Is your love a distraction or a motivation?


7. The Test Of Problem Solving
A couple in love faces problems frankly and tries to solve them. Infatuated people tend to disregard or try to ignore problems. If there are barriers to getting married for a couple in love, those barriers are approached and removed. The barriers that cannot be removed may be circumvented with knowledge. They do not go into marriage blindly. They handle problems with clear, shared decisions.

While infatuation mixed with classic denial with an added pinch of insanity, is a such relationship that isn't based on communication, genuine knowledge, geography, core values, commitment, or spiritual vision, it therefore doesn't face prevent problems nor is prepared to face future challenges.

How good are you and your partner at seeing problems and working on them? Or do you avoid them and focus on the feel good feelings?


8. The Test Of Distance
Love knows the importance of distance. Infatuation imagines love to be intense closeness, 24/7, all the time.
If circumstances require you to be temporarily separated from the one you love, that will teach you a lot about the quality of your relationship. In terms of distance, if you're in a long-term relationship right now and you call each other three, four, or five times a day, or you just have to see each other every day, that's not a good sign. That means you're trying to keep the chemicals alive.

If there is not a sense of separateness, a distinct life, relationships with other people, and healthy balance, then the relationship is probably a lot more infatuation than it is love.
Because genuine love is not based just on emotions, some distance will often let you know what is really in your heart.

How does your love handle distance?
Do you tend to get anxious and frustrated when you can't be together all the time?


9. The Test Of Physical Attraction
Physical attraction is a relatively small part of genuine love, but it is the central focus of infatuation. Now don't read "small part" to mean "not a part" in what I just stated. If your heart doesn't skip a beat now and then and you don't feel real attraction for your mate or the person you plan to marry, I'd call that a problem.

Let's not make genuine love so spiritual that we deny reality and God's Word. Sexual attraction definitely has a part in love.

A lack of attraction brings a lack of attention which results to a lack of affection. When there’s not enough attraction, or the attraction isn't mutual, it is very easy for a lack of respect to show up; and obviously lack of respect will destroy a relationship.
It isn't just about how they look but how attracted you both are to each other because it is that attraction that will remain even when looks begin to fade.

Can you really handle a lack of attraction with your partner for the rest of your life? Apart from physical attraction, how would your mate say he or she knows that you love him or her? Does it feel like the attraction is not mutual but one sided?


10. The Test Of Affection
When affection flows out of deep understanding and growing friendship, it gains in meaning and value.
In your relationship, how is affection balanced out by friendship love and giving love?
or are you or your partner solely or mainly interested in the physical display of affection?


11. The Test Of Stability
Love tends to endure. Infatuation may change suddenly and unpredictably. Real love is stable. There is commitment.
The best way to test stability in a new relationship comes through knowing that person in the context of his or her other relationships.

How a male treats the females close to him, his sisters, mother, female friends matter just as it does for how females treat their brothers and father as well.

How is he or she in relation to parents, friends, and siblings?

Frankly, someone who has been married more than once ought to expect to be calmly and seriously tested when it comes to the
question of stability.

Perhaps one of the first and best questions to ask as you think about testing stability in your relationship is this:

How would I demonstrate to my partner that I have developed the characteristic of stability in my relationships?

What's your track record in relationships?
What is your partner's?

Is there a pattern that raises confidence or warning signals?



Note: I won't advice you to break off a relationship because a few tests don't fall in your favor, at times we need to mature and grow a relationship for there to be true love in it and not just feelings.


12. The Test Of Delayed Gratification
A couple in genuine love is not indifferent to the timing of their wedding, but they do not feel an irresistible drive toward it. An infatuated couple tends to feel an urge to get married instantly.

Two Bible couples offer us a sharp contrast of these two approaches:
Amnon and Tamar (whose story is told in 2 Samuel 13) and Jacob and Rachel (whose story you will find in Genesis 29:1-20).

Amnon represents a guy who couldn't wait. He had a case of consuming infatuation; he was obsessed with Tamar. When he took by force what he thought he wanted, his "love" vanished like smoke. He couldn't wait, and it spelled destruction in his own life as well as Tamar's.

Jacob was attracted to Rachel almost immediately. Yet he had to work seven years in order to marry Rachel. That's five years beyond the typical lifespan of infatuation.

Do you think his love understood stability and delayed gratification?

The Bible says that the seven years "seemed like only a few days." Why? "Because of his love for her." It wasn't about his lustful needs; it was about something really worth waiting for.

As you enter into a potentially serious relationship, ask yourself if your pace is based in fear or faith. Don't let pressure from people push you or pride make you lose patience.

Is your pace based on anxiety over deprivation and physical drives, or is your pace the result of a desire for careful and thorough preparation for marriage?


All these tests were taught in MDM biblical teaching group.

How many of these tests have you taken previously or do you believe is absolutely necessary for you right now?

Good, you can move this to religious section, it may hit front page on Sunday

Thiwalade:
Good, you can move this to religious section, it may hit front page on Sunday

Thanks

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