What is the Difference between Love and Lust?

Are you wondering what the difference is between lust and love? They both sound as if they are related, but yet at the same time they are not. You can have the feeling of lust towards your partner, but you wouldn’t have that same feeling of lust towards your parents. So what is the difference between lust and love?

If you look at the feeling of lust, it typically comes without an act of appreciation towards you. Take Brad Pitt, Jessica Alba or any other type of heartthrob and you will notice that people lust for these types of people and yet none of those heartthrobs have shown any appreciation towards them. Since you can feel lust without someone else really appreciating you, as we have defined love as appreciation, then lust cannot be the same love as we have defined it here. Instead, we need to examine lust from a different angle.

Three things that define lust is that it happens very quickly so it does not progress over time like love does, it is a rush of excitement and it begins to die down after a certain period of time. Other things that cause a very quick rush of excitement that also die down after a period of time is winning the lottery, getting a free car and the Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup (Okay that last one would probably just excite me and other Maple Leaf fans). The commonality with all of these things that cause a rush of excitement is that they are all things that you’ve wanted that you finally got.

For proof, if someone was a billionaire and they won a lottery that gave them $10,000, it wouldn’t mean as much as someone who was living in debt because the person who is in debt wants money more then the billionaire. However, that $10,000 won’t be as exciting to the person in debt after one year even if they still had the $10,000.

Since getting what you want gives you the same feeling as lust does, then we can conclude that lust is just finding someone that you want. The difference between love and lust is that lust is finding what you want and love is showing that someone that you appreciate them.