How Do We Know When We’ve Fallen in Love? My Informal Survey Reveals Three Big Patterns

Emily Tamkin wrote for Quartz about how—and when—we become sure we’ve fallen in love:

Two months and one day after our first date, a man I’ll call Daniel asked to come over to my place and talk about our relationship.

“I like you very much,” he said after he’d arrived at my apartment in Washington, DC, “but I don’t know that this is a long-term thing.” He wanted to keep dating me for now, he explained, but he didn’t know that he saw a future with me, or that he felt the way one should feel after two months.

For my own part, I knew that I liked Daniel. He was compassionate, with a wry sense of humor. He was thoughtful about things like not talking to me about his exes too much and—that most important of dating skills—texting back. I told him that I’d like to keep dating, too, and that I thought we should keep seeing each other as long as that was what we both wanted.

But I also thought he was putting too much pressure on the relationship. I didn’t think there was a set point in time at which we had to be sure about each other. And if there was, I certainly didn’t think it happened at the two-month mark.

The conversation got me thinking: At what point do people know they’ve met the “right” person?