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Is there a difference between Passion and Love?

Many of us, when we speak about Love, treat Passion as an entirely separate thing from it. We often hear about dates 'falling into lust' at the beginning of a relationship when the two people are so into each other, so attracted and mesmerised by one another, they want to spend as much time together as they can and to make love as often as possible. The feelings at such times seem deep, exciting and endless. On the other hand, there are many couples, especially in long term relationships, who have lost their 'chemistry', and their Passion for each other. They do things mechanically and without motivation as part of their settled routine. Many have not even had sex for years or affirmed each other in any way.

These twin situations have led some people to believe that any intense passionate feelings when two people have just met cannot be relied upon as a good barometer of lasting Love. That because it is tied to 'lust', the 'real Love' comes much later on or not at all. We also talk of having a 'Passion' for something: an interest, hobby or activity that gives us great joy. Thus we can usually tell how meaningful something is to us by how we feel about it; the way it moves us to want to express our feelings for it and be devoted to it to greater levels.

And that's what Passion is, in a nutshell: the intensity of feeling we have for someone or something. It is not a thing in its own right, like Love. It has to be associated with something else to have any value. It gains its existence by demonstrating how much we actually care about something that's important to us. Thus the degree of Passion is the giveaway sign.

Passion is like a marker, a ruler or yardstick, but it is not Love itself. Passion is essentially the intensity of the Love we feel. If we have rapidly lost our Passion for someone it's not because we didn't love them in the first place, or we only felt lust for them. It is more likely because, over time, as the person has revealed him/herself, our Passion has gradually decreased in its level, or increased, and we are feeling differently about them. So lust isn't really separate from Love. Both are the same at the beginning because both can take off or fall flat, depending on the level of Passion we feel for the object of our affection.

It seems that Love has a chance to blossom and reveal its true self when Passion subsides, but not too much. If we use a numerical scale for assigning levels of Passion,

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