Many people will tell you that love can’t grow from lust. I’m not one of those people. I’ve had a number of relationships flourish in the fitful bouts of passion that only lust can throw you into. However, it’d be dishonest of me not to point out that the road from lust to love is usually fraught with peril and usually ends as aggressively and abruptly as it began. To avoid such disappointment, how can women tell whether that warm feeling she gets when she’s around the man of her dreams (or her fantasies) is radiating from the fires of lust or the embers of love?

With men, the primary difference between lust and love is what we’re willing to do to preserve the two. For lust, we’ll likely do the bare minimum because we don’t have much to lose besides sex – great sex although it may be. Like a wild fire, lust often starts fiercely but quickly dissipates as it burns itself out. A relationship built on lust is only as stable as the source of fuel feeding it. Once that goes away, the relationship will likely cool too.
Love can burn as fiercely as lust, but unlike lust, you have to put in work to keep love burning. Due to the work requirement – and the fact that most men are emotionally lazy – we tend to eject once we realize the lust is gone and we’re going to have to invest ourselves emotionally to make the relationship last. Although men may lack in development in many areas when it comes to relationships, almost all men are eerily skilled at separating their emotional feelings from their physical feelings.

Contrary to popular belief, most men know what they want from a relationship with most women they encounter. Stated another way – and perhaps in a more accurate way – most men know what they do not want from a relationship. As far as women are concerned, a man who knows what he wants is just as emotionally dangerous as a man who doesn’t know what he wants, especially since both men are about as equally unlikely to tell you what’s really on their minds unless they want to. In my opinion, even the absence of him claiming he doesn’t know what he wants from you is not the evidence of hope; it should be the evidence of doubt.

Far too many women will ask a man, in so many words, whether their relationship is based on love or lust and in the absence of a confirmation of love, she assumes their lust for one another will grow into something more with the passage of time. Honestly, this would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to have if it wasn’t inconsistent with the different ways men and women approach relationships. Whereas women tend to equate the passage of time with growth in the relationship, men equate the passage of time with…nothing. In other words, men are perfectly content maintaining a lust-based relationship into infinity and beyond with no expectation, hope, forward thinking, or desire for a relationship or love to ever grow.

Nevertheless, there’s a place for both lust and love in our lives. Men tend to fall in lust for all the wrong reasons but in love for some of the right reasons. While men process them separately, the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. As I mentioned in the beginning, in some instances, lust even plants the seed needed for love to bloom. After all, once we get over kissing until our lips are sore, among other areas, we might start to realize, “I think I like this person in areas that extend beyond the bedroom.” But, you have to prepare yourself for the fact that most men do isolate what happens below their hips from what happens above. If you want him to appreciate more than the lust he has for you, you’ll eventually have to connect with what’s above his hips (preferably above his shoulders) too.

What’s the difference between love and lust to you? Do you think true love can ever grow from pure lust? Have you ever had a loving relationship grow from lusty beginnings?

WisdomIsMisery aka WIM provides objective, yet opinionated, qualitative and quantitative analysis on life, love, and everything in between. As a Scorpio, many women wish death on WIM and some have attempted to hasten its arrival. WIM is not a model, a model citizen, or a role model. See more of WIM on his weekly write-ups for SBM and on Twitter @WisdomIsMisery.

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