When Liking Becomes the Measure of Love

For a long time, I struggled to understand something about my marriage that seemed almost impossible to reconcile with my understanding of love.

I eventually came to understand that we were not necessarily operating from the same definition of what a relationship was supposed to be.

For me, loving someone meant something much larger than liking them.

For my husband, liking appeared to carry far greater relational significance. He had been taught by his father that when choosing someone to marry, you had to "like" the person you married. On the surface, this sounds entirely reasonable. Of course we should like the person we marry. Friendship, enjoyment, attraction, shared interests and compatibility are important foundations for an intimate relationship.

But liking someone and loving someone are not psychologically equivalent.

And perhaps one of the most important distinctions in intimate relationships is understanding that liking is an emotion, while love is a relational orientation.

Liking is largely concerned with how another person makes us feel.

Love is concerned with the person.

We like people because we enjoy their company, appreciate their personality, share interests with them, find them attractive, admire them or experience pleasure in their presence. These are valuable aspects of intimacy.

But liking is inherently vulnerable to fluctuation.

People disappoint us. They irritate us. They misunderstand us. They change. They become tired, sick, stressed, angry or difficult.

There will inevitably be moments in a marriage when we do not particularly like our spouse.

That does not necessarily mean that we have stopped loving them.

This distinction became increasingly important to me because I began to recognise that mature love requires something that simple liking does not necessarily require: the capacity to tolerate the temporary absence of positive feelings without abandoning the relationship itself.

Holding Contradictory Emotions

An emotionally mature person can hold contradictory emotions simultaneously.

"I am angry with you, and I love you."

"I am deeply hurt by what happened, and I still care about you."

"I don't like what you have done, but I do not therefore cease to recognise your humanity."

"I am disappointed, but I want to understand."

This capacity is part of emotional complexity. It allows a person to differentiate between the behaviour of another human being and the inherent value of that human being.

Without that distinction, relationships can become dangerously conditional.

If being liked is experienced as the highest form of relational security, then the relationship becomes dependent upon continued positive affect.

I like you, therefore I love you. You disappoint me, therefore I no longer like you. I no longer like you, therefore I no longer feel connected to you. I no longer feel connected to you, therefore there is no reason to repair what has been damaged.

That progression is profoundly different from mature love.

Because mature love does not require us to like everything about another person. It requires us to remain capable of seeing the person beyond the moment.

The Parent and the Child

This is why I often think about the difference between how we understand our children and how we sometimes understand romantic relationships.

A parent can be furious with their child. A child can behave terribly. A child can say something cruel, break a rule, disappoint their parent or become someone their parent profoundly struggles to understand.

And yet the parent does not stop feeding the child because they have stopped liking them. They do not suddenly conclude that the child's worth has disappeared.

The relationship contains something larger than the immediate emotion. There is attachment. There is responsibility. There is care. There is an enduring recognition of personhood.

That does not mean accepting harmful behaviour without boundaries. Love does not eliminate boundaries, accountability or consequences. But it does mean that temporary negative feelings do not automatically erase the underlying human bond.

Likability and Lovability

This is where I began to understand the difference between likability and lovability.

If a person's sense of connection is organised primarily around whether they like you, then your position in the relationship can become precarious.

You are secure while you are pleasing. Secure while you are agreeable. Secure while you are validating. Secure while you make the other person feel good.

But what happens when you question them? What happens when you disappoint them? What happens when they misunderstand you? What happens when you become angry? What happens when you have needs that conflict with theirs? What happens when you stop being emotionally convenient?

Rupture and Repair

A mature relationship should have somewhere to go after those moments. That place is called repair.

Relationships do not survive because they never rupture. They survive because ruptures can be acknowledged, understood and repaired.

A disagreement should be able to become a conversation. Hurt should be able to become disclosure. Anger should be able to become understanding. Misunderstanding should be able to become clarification. Distance should be able to become reconnection.

But when liking becomes the measure of love, rupture can instead become rejection. One disagreement can become evidence that the person is no longer desirable. One misunderstood comment can become a permanent relational verdict.

The question changes from: "What happened between us?" to: "Do I still like you?"

And once the answer becomes no, the relationship itself can begin to feel dispensable.

That is the profound danger of confusing liking with love.

Love as the Greater Undertaking

Liking is tidal. It comes in and it goes out. Love, at its healthiest, is anchored.

This does not mean that love is passive. Quite the opposite.

Love requires work. It requires curiosity. It requires humility. It requires communication. It requires the capacity to say, "I was hurt by what you said," rather than disappearing. It requires the ability to tolerate the discomfort of difficult conversations. It requires the capacity to see another person's perspective without immediately surrendering one's own. It requires repair after rupture.

And perhaps most importantly, it requires the ability to distinguish "I don't like what you did" from "I don't value you." Those statements are not the same.

To love another human being is, in some profound sense, to recognise that their humanity exceeds your current emotional response to them.

That is why love is a higher-order relational construct than simple liking.

We do not make lifelong vows because we promise to enjoy one another every day. We make vows because we recognise that there will be days when enjoyment disappears. There will be sickness. There will be disappointment. There will be disagreement. There will be seasons of distance. There will be things we discover about one another that we did not know when we first fell in love.

And the question becomes whether the relationship has sufficient emotional maturity to survive those realities.

Liking Asks. Love Asks Differently.

Because liking asks whether the relationship feels good. Love asks whether the relationship is worth caring for.

Liking asks, "Do I enjoy you?" Love asks, "Can I still see you?"

Liking asks, "How do you make me feel?" Love asks, "What is happening to you?"

Liking can disappear when the fantasy disappears. Love begins where fantasy ends.

And perhaps that is why love is the greater undertaking.

We may like someone because they fit beautifully into our life. But we love someone when we recognise that they are a whole human being — with needs, wounds, contradictions, weaknesses, strengths and a dignity that cannot be reduced to whether they are currently pleasing us.

We do not build a marriage on whether we will always like each other. We build it on whether we are willing to keep seeing each other as human beings when liking temporarily disappears.

Because we may live for love. We may sacrifice for love. We may endure hardship for love. We may give our lives for love.

But we do not build a life around the promise that we will always like someone. We marry the person we love — not because we will always like them, but because love is supposed to be larger than the days on which we don't.