Can you explain the difference between love and lust as it applies to you, for how you know when feelings you have for someone is one or the other? Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. Harder question. Can you explain the difference between love and lust for the masses? Maybe you think you can. Maybe you know you can’t.

Many people are challenged to know the difference between love and lust. I am no longer challenged myself, though I have no simple advice for how to become less challenged. However, I’m still challenged for being able to assess whether new relationships I observe are based on love or on lust more. To determine that, I only have a cute little saying with conditional rather than predictive outcome. That is, the saying associates conditions with potential outcomes rather than provides tools to predict outcome that someone might be able to use. The saying is if it were lust, it will pass, if it were love, it will last. It is of no help to observers to determine if the relationship they were observing were built more on love or lust, but it is correct in predicting how the relationship will turn out, if what it was based on were known.

If, at this point, you were pointing out that not all relationships based on love last forever, I’ll point out the quote neither said nor suggested love relationships would last forever. Last should only be taken to mean what the word means, which is some decent amount of time. To be fair, most relationships probably start with a mix of, both, love and lust, so the word mostly should be in the quote to describe, each, love and lust to be more correct. It just makes for an clumsy sounding quote so I left it out.

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This post is one of 70 quotes I wrote, each with an accompanying essay, in my e-book and paperback Stars I Put in my Sky to Live By, on Amazon or Smashwords (choose your price including free!).