9 Reasons ‘Just For Now’ Love Is Still Real Love
By Liz James
1. Wanting different things down the road doesn’t disprove love in the present. In fact, it allows your love to live and grow honestly because you aren’t trying to make promises you know you can’t keep.
2. It allows you to love without feeling like you need to have a say in everything the other person does. It reminds you that no part of love is controlling, and that you don’t need to prove your love by trying to have a say in everything they do.
3. It eliminates all the fights you have with one person trying to control the other, and just lets you focus on the love you’re building. So many people in long-term relationships claim that you need to get through those fights to really establish your love, but that is not always true.
4. Your friends and family assume it isn’t real because they don’t always get to meet a ‘just for now’ love, but their validation isn’t something your relationship needs. And sometimes taking family and friends out of the equation puts a lot less pressure on the relationship, which gives it more time to build on its own.
5. Your love doesn’t need to feel weighed down with all the heavy talks about the future that you’re “supposed” to have. But there is honestly not a whole lot in love that you’re “supposed” to do. Following the norm is not what makes love real and authentic.
6. You know that you don’t need to be connected to them all day every day to know they are thinking about you. You don’t feel the need to keep aggressive tabs on one another. Yes, there are couples who are always glued to each other, even when they aren’t together, via text, but that isn’t what the two of you need, and at the end of the day, every relationship is different.
7. And you feel the same way about the future: you won’t always keep tabs on each other. You don’t need to always be connected in the future, and while that was originally hard to accept, it’s so much better to be honest about it. You know you might go through periods where you talk less, or lose touch, and you don’t let it upset you too much, which is very liberating.
8. Just because it won’t last forever, doesn’t mean you won’t always have a special place in your heart for them. And you know they will always keep a special place in their heart for you. In fact, there’s always a chance that ‘just for now’ love will turn into something else – maybe ‘forever love’- down the road. But you don’t need to put that pressure on your love right now, because you don’t know if it will evolve in the future, and that is okay.
9. Love doesn’t need to come with a long-term commitment to be real. It REALLY doesn’t. Making future plans is not what makes your love real and honest and true in the present. It’s just that the people who ARE making future plans would lead you to believe that’s the only way to show love and commitment. But you can show love and commitment to them whenever you want, through your actions and words right now. And you don’t need anything else.