Is it love or just lust? A therapist’s advice

The words love and lust are often juxtaposed against each other—but in reality, they can go hand in hand. Or one may precede the other. Lust may turn into love, for example—and that’s perfectly normal and natural.

I understand the need to categorize your feelings, including romantic ones, like wondering whether you’re in lust or in love. It’s natural—healthy, actually—to want to understand your emotions. 

Sometimes, though, your feelings can go to an extreme, where you question your relationship, and are deeply distressed by the uncertainty that being a part of a couple can bring, says April Kilduff, MA, LCPC, LMHC, a licensed therapist and Clinical Trainer at NOCD. 

Keep reading for a few things we do know for certain about love and lust, as well as whether the upsetting feelings you’re experiencing could signal a more serious mental health condition. (And if so, there’s help!)

What is love and what is lust?

We don’t all experience love the same way, of course, but there are some hallmarks:

• Having positive emotions when you’re around the other person—like joy, connection, and warmth
• Feeling like you can be yourself without needing to change. Ditto your partner.
• Encouraging each other’s growth and fulfillment 
• Sharing a mutual respect
• Having similar values and goals

Signs of lust include: 

• Feeling drawn to someone without knowing much about them
• Craving physical but not emotional intimacy 

Could your relationship questions be something else?

Again, there’s nothing inherently bad or wrong about wanting to understand yourself and your feelings. However, it moves beyond healthy if your questions about love and lust take up a significant amount of your time and brain space, cause you distress, or impair any area of your life. 

If this is the case for you, and you feel stuck in trying to determine exactly what you’re feeling, with the sense that you can’t trust your interpretation of your experience, you could be going through a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) called relationship OCD (ROCD). This mental health condition rests on doubt and finding every millimeter of room for it. You may get caught in a loop of constantly comparing your relationship to other couples, or you may use other people’s definitions of love and lust as a means of either proving or disproving your feelings. 

“We don’t know exactly what causes OCD, and the subtype of ROCD, but we do know that there isn’t a singular thing that triggers it,” says Kilduff. “There can be a brain component, a genetic component, and particular environmental stressors that set it off. Some of it can even be learned behavior. And it appears that certain people are just predisposed to OCD.”

Just like any theme of OCD, ROCD causes recurrent, unwanted, often uncomfortable intrusive thoughts, images, urges, sensations, or feelings (obsessions). While everyone experiences intrusive thoughts sometimes, if you have OCD you’re unable to dismiss them as untrue or strange. Instead, you interpret these intrusive thoughts as being threats to who you are, and what you believe to be true.

The focus of ROCD intrusive thoughts is, naturally, relationships—it most often shows up in romantic relationships, but it can extend to others, too. Here are examples of what your intrusive thoughts might sound like:

• What if my partner doesn’t really love me?
• What if I don’t really love my partner?
• What if they’re not attracted to me enough?
• What if I’m not attracted to them enough?
• What if I don’t actually know what love is?
• What if this is going to wind up hurting us both?
• Why do I have an urge to end things? Does that mean it’s just lust?
• Why do I feel ambivalent toward them?

Since OCD causes you to take intrusive thoughts so seriously, distress follows—such as anxiety, fear, panic, shame, embarrassment, guilt, and/or confusion. These uncomfortable feelings spur you to engage in compulsions, which are any physical or mental act done in direct response to intrusive thoughts. They’re done to try to get rid of your thoughts and feelings indefinitely, but in reality, compulsions only offer fleeting relief.

These are some common compulsions with ROCD:

• Reassurance-seeking. This is one of the most common compulsions among those with ROCD, and it’s when you seek reassurance from others or yourself that your intrusive thoughts aren’t true. For example, you may repeatedly ask your partner, “What if we break up?” or “Describe how much you love me.” Or you may repeat to yourself, Of course my partner loves me. Of course they’re a good person.
• Rumination. This can be thought of as extreme overthinking or overanalyzing. It feels like getting stuck in a thought loop where you replay the same thoughts, images, questions, or worries over and over in your head, hoping that eventually an “answer” to your intrusive thoughts will emerge. For example, you might ruminate on the question: Is this really love, or is it just lust?
• Mental review. This is the act of combing through specific memories or interactions to look for signs that prove or disprove your intrusive thoughts. When trying to determine whether your feelings are really love, you may reflect on all the time you’ve spent together and ask yourself, Was that thing they did a sign that it’s just lust? Did that comment mean it’s not love? There is the perception that you can’t trust your memories or your interpretation of them. 
• Excessive research. This is similar to reassurance-seeking, except that the “proof” you’re looking for comes from the internet or other sources, rather than people. You may read article after article about relationships, take a quiz that tests whether you’re“really in love, or search for stories of people who thought they were in love but weren’t. “There are so many places you can go to look for reassurance on the internet—whereas if you’re seeking reassurance from a person, they might get tired of it. But you can just endlessly go online and search for reassurance and probably find it,” says Kilduff.
• Confessing. Guilt often accompanies ROCD, because you may feel like you’re betraying your partner by having doubtful thoughts. As a result, you may confess your feelings, even though you haven’t actually done anything wrong. Telling your partner your thoughts can seem like a way to relieve your guilt, clear your conscience, and maybe even get some reassurance in the process. (Your partner might respond by saying, “Don’t worry, that’s ridiculous—we are so in love!”)
• Avoidance is the process of steering clear of any stimuli that triggers your intrusive thoughts, including people, situations, places, and media. You may avoid intimacy, for example, because it makes you wonder if your relationship is just based on lust. Or you might avoid talking with your friends about their relationships, knowing that you’ll compare them to yours.

Compulsions reinforce the idea that your intrusive thoughts, as well as the uncomfortable feelings that come with them, are serious threats that must mean something and need to be solved. 

How to get help for ROCD

Now for the good news: There’s an evidence-based, effective treatment for ROCD that will teach you how to stop reacting to your intrusive thoughts and staying stuck in the obsessive-compulsive cycle.

How, you ask? Well, all themes of OCD are treated the same way—through a science-proven type of therapy called exposure and response-prevention (ERP). You may have heard of “exposure therapy,” but the “response-prevention” piece of ERP is also crucial—it’s what ultimately breaks the ROCD cycle. 

The ERP process begins with you and your therapist working together to gain the best possible understanding of what your intrusive thoughts sound like, what triggers them, and what compulsions you perform. If you have a high level of awareness around your experience of OCD already, this part may be brief. If not, don’t worry—your therapist will help you to gain awareness. 

From there, the two of you will continue to work together to develop a hierarchy of exposures based on your unique triggers—meaning that you’ll start small and work your way up to exposures that bring the most distress. All the while, your therapist will give you tools to resist performing compulsions (that’s the response-prevention part). 

Here are a few examples of what exposures could look like:

• Writing out a worst case scenario, such as If this is just lust, then…
• Watching a video of someone who is in a purely lustful relationship
• Engaging in activities or situations you’ve been avoiding, such as intimacy
  

Naturally, you might experience an initial spike in anxiety, but this is part of the process. “With OCD, things usually feel a bit worse before they get better. It makes sense that you’ll feel anxious at the beginning, because you’re not getting that short-term ‘hit’ of relief from doing the compulsion,” says Kilduff. “But we know when people sit through their discomfort and realize that they can cope with it, things start to get better, and the anxiety goes down.”

Each exposure gives you an opportunity to practice dealing with your distress and uncertainty. Over time, this desensitizes you to your intrusive thoughts, and you’ll realize that they’re not dangerous. They cease to hold so much power over you, and you can approach your relationship with curiosity and openness rather than fear. 

Eventually, you’ll feel empowered to be the judge of your own feelings, to embrace their uncertainty and fluidity, and to trust your experience. 

Working with an OCD specialist to address the thoughts and situations that cause you distress is more accessible than ever thanks to virtual ERP therapy. In fact, peer reviewed research shows live teletherapy sessions of ERP can be more effective, delivering results in less time than traditional outpatient ERP therapy, often in as little as 12 weeks. 

Want to begin your ERP therapist search? We encourage you to browse the NOCD Therapist Directory. Every NOCD therapist is not only specialized in ERP but trained to deliver treatment online. Choose your therapist and we do the rest, including helping with scheduling and payment. Of course, if NOCD Therapists aren’t the right fit, you can also explore the International OCD Foundation Therapist Directory.