Love vs. Attachment: How to Tell the Difference and Protect Your Heart.
"Most people fall in love with the feeling, not the person. This week, I’m diving into the difference between true love and attachment — and how knowing the difference changes everything."
Do you know what true love is? What does it feel like? What does it look like? Almost everyone in my circle would answer those questions with a long pause, and if they even try to answer, would begin with an even longer, convoluted description of how people attach to each other. Ultimately, they exhaust themselves and decide that they don’t have a good answer.
I am one of those people who believed that I fell in love easily and deeply. As I matured in my personal journey, I began to discover that what I really was doing was attaching easily and deeply. In this post, I will explore the differences between those two emotional experiences.
This post isn’t about how to love, but rather how to trust yourself to recognize real love.
Attachment Theories
This topic deserves its own post, perhaps several, but for now, I will try to define attachment for the purposes of highlighting the differences between it and the many, many, many definitions of love.
You may have noticed how prevalent the use and exploitation of attachment styles are in social media these days. These conversations often take the complex theoretical research about how children attach to their parents or caregivers; how that directs their relationship behaviors, and reduces it down to four attachment styles.
This post isn’t about attachment styles, but learning how to differentiate between a relationship that is mutually fulfilling, supportive, and emotionally safe; as opposed to one that is used to heal a part of you that you have been avoiding healing for yourself. The attachment theory that was developed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby and later expanded by American psychologist Mary Ainsworth, emphasizes the importance of early relationships with caregivers and how that influences emotional and social maturation.
How that matters in this conversation is that for most of my life, I would enter into romantic relationships believing at my core that I had fallen in love. It wasn’t until the umpteenth time I was crushed, disappointed, and left wondering what happened, that I learned that I was wrong. I had been conditioned by my sense of lack, my feelings of inadequacy, and my fear of loss to believe that I wasn’t loving or allowing myself to be loved. I was attaching to anyone that would give me the slightest bit of attention. I was more focused on trying to fill what was missing in me through someone else, rather than prioritizing being a healthy partner.
Passion Can Fool You
One of my favorite emotions is that feeling at the beginning of a new relationship. That time when everything is a new experience. It’s when most of us are putting forth our best energy. It’s also when we are least likely to show our truest self. We mask, we self-edit, we mirror the energy of the other person. All in an effort to get the other person to like us. It is only when we feel secure in the relationship that we start to reveal our shadows, and if the other person likes you, they are likely putting on the same performance.
True love is never in a hurry
Most often, what we become attracted to is that positive energy, that spark of excitement, that mystery, that endorphin rush that fuels our emotions, ego, and libido. That passion can be so intense that you don’t realize that it is likely only based on the best versions that you have both presented. I’m not saying that you should introduce the worst aspects of yourself right at the beginning. Just be aware that there is so much to learn and to offer.
Both extremes are an unrealistic view of you as a whole person. Take your time, have meaningful and important conversations. Spend time with each other in a variety of situations so that by the time the passion has leveled out, you will have a solid foundation from which to overcome the inevitable conflicts that will arise.
At the same time, avoid enforcing artificial delays. Allow the relationship to progress in ways that feel natural and timely. Honor both your and your person’s level of comfort, interest, and expectations. You should never allow yourself to be pressured to do anything in a relationship that you don’t agree is in your own best interests.
Is it Love?
One of the keys to determining whether the budding relationship you’ve set your sights on is love or attachment is understanding how you show up. Have you developed enough emotional intelligence and security to look at the patterns of your relationship history? Are you able to look at them honestly and without shame?
I had to learn that my patterns were not failures; they are information. Love becomes possible when we recognize what we keep repeating and why. Once I stopped blaming my partners for how I was feeling, and delved into my own unmet needs, fears, and expectations, I was able to take ownership of my internal regulation, instead of relying on another person to validate my emotions.
If you are connecting to someone through attachment, your relationships will often look like this:
Expecting someone else to calm your anxiety
Needing constant reassurance to feel secure
Depending on another person’s behavior to determine your mood
Feeling regulated only when the other person is present, responsive, or approving
Becoming distressed when they pull away, disagree, or don’t respond “correctly”
In short:
Your emotional state depends on someone else’s actions.
Presence: Showing Up with Intent
Love is neither anticipation nor fantasy.
It does not exist in who we hope someone will become, or in the story we tell ourselves about where the relationship might go if everything aligns perfectly. Love lives in presence.
Presence asks us to show up as ourselves, not as a performance or a projection. It requires intention — to be emotionally available, to listen without preparing a defense, and engaging without trying to control the outcome. When we are present, we stop connecting to an idea of someone; we connect to the person in front of us.
Attachment tends to pull us out of the moment. It has us scanning for reassurance, reading between lines, filling in silences with fear, or clinging to potential rather than reality. Presence, on the other hand, keeps us grounded. It allows us to observe what is actually happening; how we feel when we are with this person, how conflict is handled, how care is shown, and whether emotional safety exists without effort or performance.
Showing up with intent means you’re choosing curiosity over assumption and connection over fantasy. It means conversations feel reciprocal, affection feels freely given, and your nervous system rests rather than braces when you’re with them.
Practicing presence means we protect our hearts not by closing them, but by staying awake. Awake to patterns. Awake to signals. Awake to whether we are being met where we stand, not pulled into who we are trying to become for someone else.
This is where love becomes real; not dramatic or suffocating, but safe, grounded, and deeply spiritual.
Leaning into Love
Learning the difference between love and attachment is not about becoming guarded or withholding your heart. It is about becoming honest — with yourself first. Love is patient. It does not rush intimacy or demand certainty. It grows through presence, responsibility, and mutual care. Attachment, on the other hand, often disguises fear as intensity and urgency as devotion. When we slow down enough to recognize our patterns, take ownership of our emotional world, and show up with intention rather than expectation, we create space for love to exist without pressure. In that space, connection becomes safer, clearer, and more real — and our hearts are protected not by walls, but by awareness.