Why Do I Fall in Love So Fast?

https://upjourney.com/why-do-i-fall-in-love-so-fast-and-so-easily

You fall in love with the fantasy

Many people have life goals of having long-term partners and even getting married. This can be a personal goal or even a cultural pressure from society or family units. Sometimes people fall in love quickly because they are seeking the end goal of marriage or partnership.

Sometimes this choice is wise, because the person properly assesses respect and continuity of values with their partner, and other times it is too rushed. When it is rushed, the person may just see the end goal and a partner who is willing to give them that end goal, instead of assessing for long-term compatibility.

Sandra Myers

Sandra Myers

President, Select Date Society

  • You want to be in love. You are at a point in life where you want to fall in love and you desire a relationship. It’s easy to fall in love because you’re so ready for love.
  • You are picky & finally found someone who has everything you want on paper. You have a laundry list of qualities your ideal partner “must-have.” He must be 6’2″ with a square jawline, earn $150k+ per year, speak 3 languages, etc. Suddenly, you find someone who has all the criteria you’ve tried so hard to find, so you fall quickly and fast.
  • Your partner is a narcissist. Narcissists are master manipulators at the beginning of a narcissistic relationship. They will do and say all the right things to make you fall for them.
  • You’ve experienced bad relationships. You have been through one bad relationship after another and you finally meet a great person who treats you well. You find it so refreshing compared to your past relationships, so you fall in love hard and fast.
  • There is a cocktail of drugs being released by your brain. When you are in a new relationship, your brain releases oxytocin and other chemicals that make you feel drawn to that person and “in love.”
  • You feel pressured by society. All of your friends are married and many have started to have children. You are starting to feel left out. Every time you show up to a family gathering, your relatives are asking, “When are you going to get married?”
  • You’re on the rebound. You recently ended a relationship and the new person you’re dating has all the great qualities your ex was missing.
  • You’ve achieved success in every other area of your life. You have a great career and a great social life, but you still feel unfulfilled. You meet someone great and think they are the missing piece you’ve been searching for.

Discover the reasons why you fall in love so fast and so easily, according to experts.

Here are their insights:

Natalie Maximets

Natalie Maximets

Certified Life Transformation Coach, Online Divorce

Obsessive feelings of constantly falling in love and misunderstandings of what is happening and how to live in general are problems that torment many people. Unless you’re a teenager with raging hormones, this behavior can be pretty debilitating.

You are escaping from reality

People who often fall in love live in fantasies. New emotions for them are a way of escaping from real problems into their fictional world. This behavior is associated with increased anxiety, fears, and self-doubt.

When a person is under stress, their psyche looks for ways to protect them. Feelings for a new partner become a lifeline. Interestingly, an amorous person focuses on their emotions and not on a partner.

This situation clearly describes an internal conflict. A person that does not have self-support to cope with life’s difficulties goes into invented worlds. They also tend to idealize the object of their fantasies.

A fictional relationship with a superhero is a way to feel safe. Moreover, as soon as they realize that the reality of the object of desire is far from a fictional image, their interest immediately disappears, and they fall in love with someone else.

What could cause such an internal conflict? When a person has matured but has not grown emotionally. From a psychological side, they are still children. They are afraid of difficulties and bad at solving problems. Therefore they are looking for someone with whom they could hide from the outside world.

You fear intimacy

For some people, quickly falling in love is a way to avoid serious relationships. They like to go through the honeymoon phase, but they are not ready for long-term commitments. Thus, people who often fall in love try not to burden themselves with difficulties.

This situation has its roots in traumatic experiences. A person may have already had a serious relationship that caused a lot of pain. Therefore, the subconscious mind decides to choose a simpler and easier way to protect itself from new disappointments.

It can also be related to traumatic experiences in childhood. When a child did not receive enough love from their parents or lived in an incomplete family, having matured, they do not know how to build a serious relationship and prefer a frequent change of partners.

You have deep feelings of loneliness

Internal inferiority often pushes people into promiscuous love affairs. And here, we are not necessarily talking about sexual intercourse. A person can often fall in love, while all-new feelings can be platonic. Loneliness causes emotional hunger, so a man or woman can fall in love often.

They form new relationships at the speed of light. But usually, such a union is short-lived. Since falling in love quickly passes, a person is looking for a new object to experience the vivid emotions again.

Such people are very often deeply unhappy since no one is able to satisfy this emotional hunger except them. And frequent falling in love does not solve the problem. It only disguises it.

You experienced a lack of parental attention

Many of our problems are associated with certain events from childhood. This is when the personality is formed, and a child learns to interact with the world by watching their parents.

If a girl was deprived of attention and care from her father (or she didn’t have a father at all), in most cases, when growing up, she will experience difficulties with the opposite sex. When a girl grows up not receiving the attention of the main man in her life, she may feel that she is not worthy of this in the adult world.

The same thing happens with boys. If the mother was emotionally cold, they might feel insecure in the relationship. Often falling in love, a person tries to put a new object in place of the parent who did not pay enough attention in childhood to feel this desired love finally.

Unfortunately, this is also a dead-end situation. No one in the world can replace the way parents were supposed to behave in childhood. Constant falling in love and the desire for new hookups will only aggravate the feeling of their insecurity.

You have low self-esteem

When a person is not aware of their worth, they experience problems in many areas of life, including relationships. They cannot form a strong alliance. Instead, such people constantly fall in love with someone else. In such a way, they prove to themselves that they do not deserve to spend a happy time together with a worthy partner.

How to stop falling in love so easily

Frequent falling in love can be exhausting. And quite a few people admit that they have discomfort from this behavior. But fortunately, psychology has ways of solving this issue.

Although an individual approach should be applied in each case, wI will tell you about the general recommendations on how to avoid falling in love so easily.

Accept the problem. The first step on the path to healing is to honestly admit to yourself that you have certain difficulties in the area of love. Only after you understand the full scale of what is happening can you move on.

Determine what led to this behavior. Everything that we do is a consequence of our experience. Thus, the psyche protects us from what brings pain. It is essential to understand that your behavior does not reflect the real you.

If you feel that you are doing something wrong, it does not mean that you are bad. Determining the cause of frequent falling in love will help you understand how to change it correctly.

It is better to take this step in individual consultations with a psychologist. A specialist can help you understand the traumatic experience without harming your psyche. Unfortunately, it can take too long if you decide to figure out the reasons on your own.

Take responsibility for yourself. The truth is that whatever happens in our life, we are responsible for it, not our parents, our boss, the government, or anyone else. Part of being an adult human being is realizing that all the events of our life are our choice.

Raise your self-esteem. When you realize that you deserve the best and allow yourself to believe in it, life will change for the better.

Replace old patterns with new ones. After you determine the reason for your frequent falling in love, you have to change the usual pattern of behavior. If negative experiences from childhood cause the craving for new partners, it is worth working through this with a psychologist to learn how to give yourself the love and attention you need independently.

The same goes for all other reasons. If negative relationships in the past cause this, you also need to change the usual behavior pattern and learn to trust people.

No matter what happens in your life, you always have the opportunity to turn it around for the better. Working on yourself is an important stage for every person, which, as a result, can affect not only the sphere of relationships but also other areas. Do not be afraid to start self-changing because you are the most valuable person in your life.

Dian Grier, LCSW

Dian Grier

Licensed Clinical Social Worker | Writer, Choosing Therapy

Mirroring family relationships

It is human nature to want a partner and to seek love. Sometimes our early relationships mimic our family patterns from early childhood. We meet someone and they seem “familiar” because they resemble what you grew up with.

This works fine if you had healthy family dynamics, but if you grew up in an unhealthy environment this can create a dysfunctional relationship. When we meet a person and they match the patterns of our parents or even from our siblings, we call it “love,” and we fall fast.

You are afraid of dying alone

Many people are afraid to be alone. I have heard from my clients many times, that “I don’t want to die alone.” Sometimes it is this feeling that motivates us to try and find a person that will help us feel as if we won’t die alone and it drives us to fall in love easily.

The problem with this is that you may choose the first person that shows interest in you. This can create dysfunctional relationships as well.

You have fear of being alone

We all need intimacy and some of us have fear of being alone, even if we are young. If you find that you do not enjoy time alone, you may be highly motivated to find a relationship.

Some individuals jump from one relationship to another just to avoid the feelings of isolation and loneliness that they feel when alone. They are not comfortable with being alone with their thoughts and fears. If they are in a relationship it brings about a sense of safety.

When we are seeking a sense of safety in relationships, we tend to create a fantasy in our heads that the person we just met will be “the one.” It is easy when we create these fantasies to ignore red flags and we begin the process of ignoring bad behavior and seeing what we want to see in this person that represents safety to us. We may find ourselves falling fast and easily into what we define as love.

Love addiction

Another concept to remember is that early in the “falling in love process, our brains light up the same area that cocaine lights up. This phase of love (early love) can be addicting because of the way the brain feels when it first falls in love. This phase can last anywhere from week one to two years.

Most people will find themselves addicted to the other person because of the way our brains work in early love. This is an adaptation from long ago, to create bonds with others. The idea is that if we can create a bond early by lighting up these areas of our brain, hopefully when it wears off, we will have established a “real” bond.

Some people though become addicted to the early love stage and once the addictive part of the relationship is over, they move onto another relationship to maintain the “high.” From this perspective falling in love fast helps create the feelings they are seeking.

You have deep insecurities

Another reason people fall in love easily and quickly is that they have deep insecurities. These feelings may have come from prior experiences of abandonment or being told they were “not enough.”

Falling in love puts a temporary band-aid on this thinking and helps keep the ego fed. The thought process is saying that “If I’m with someone, I must be good enough.”

Unfortunately, when the real work of the relationship starts, and fighting begins these old wounds come up again and any criticism will trigger these old feelings to surface. The ego will engage when it feels threatened and the couple may find themselves fighting over small issues when in actuality they are arguing over these old wounds.

Kevin Darné

You don’t have much dating and relationship experience

It is easy for someone who has very little dating experience to mistake the infatuation/honeymoon phase of a budding new relationship with being in love.

During the infatuation phase, it is common for both people to bend over backward to impress and please each other. Neither person wants to do or say anything which might blow it with the new object of their affection. The word no is seldom if ever used. Everything you want to do the other person seems to want or is willing to do as well. Conversations and laughter flow easily, cards and token gifts are given “just because”, romantic acts are spontaneous, and sex is off the charts!

It’s easy for someone with limited dating experience to believe they have found their “soulmate” during the infatuation phase of a new relationship.

Related: How Long Does the Honeymoon Phase Last

You date as if you are already in an exclusive relationship

The purpose of dating is to determine if you have chemistry, are compatible, and share the same values in order to determine if you want to become exclusive. However, there are a lot of people whose dating style is to put all of their attention and focus on one person and act as if they are already a “couple”. This type of dating style can easily cause a person to become emotionally invested in someone they barely know.

If you believe that continuous self-improvement is the path to happiness and success…

If you were looking for a job, you wouldn’t stop sending out your resume just because you had a couple of great interviews with one company. Until an offer has been made and accepted, both the company and the candidate are within their rights to interview with others.

It should go without saying that anyone you meet who maintains an active online dating profile is keeping their options open and so should you! Engaging with or dating multiple people until there is a mutual decision to become exclusive can also lessen the pain in the event you are ghosted or things don’t work out.

You are in love with falling in love

Some people are in love with the high that comes with the infatuation phase of a new relationship. However, once things start to settle down after having a few major disagreements or misunderstandings, they emotionally put one foot outside the door. People who are in love with falling in love find it difficult to sustain dating relationships beyond the 3-6 month mark.

This is generally the period where we start to reveal our “authentic selves” to each other as well as our boundaries, expectations, and “deal breakers”. The relationship is no longer all fun and games. A person in love with falling in love may believe the relationship has run it’s course.

As important as it is to find a person we are compatible with, it is actually our ability to accept each other’s differences that determines our level of happiness. It is almost a cliché to hear someone proclaim their mate is not the same person they fell in love with. That’s when a lot of people start looking for their next love fix.

“Infatuation is when you find somebody absolutely perfect. Love is when you realize that they aren’t and it doesn’t matter.” – Anonymous

You have yet to experience profound heartache

As one old adage goes: “Once bitten, twice shy.” It’s easier to be “all in” when you’ve never experienced profound heartache. Generally speaking, those who have suffered a major heartache are likely to be more cautious in their approach to dating and future relationships.

Oftentimes, it’s not until after we experience failed relationships, heartache, and betrayal that we seriously begin to craft or refine our mate selection/screening process and “must-haves list” for choosing our future mates.

We no longer simply subscribe to the “follow your heart” philosophy when it comes to dating and relationships. We are on guard for any “red flags” which might indicate someone is not right for us. We also understand it takes time to truly get to know someone.

It’s been said that men fall in love with their eyes and women fall in love with their ears. However, with age and life experience comes wisdom. Men learn all that glitters is not gold and women learn actions speak louder than words.

“Knowledge is being aware that fire can burn, wisdom is remembering the blister.” – Leo Tolstoy

Emily Griffin, MA, LCPC

Emily Griffin

Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, Clarity Through Counseling

You are an empath

You are able to easily connect with people and understand their emotions. When they relay information and feelings, you physically experience them as well. This mutual understanding happens on a deeper level than surface discussions and makes you feel especially drawn to the other person.

Having the skills of listening and understanding what it is like in someone’s world is helpful in relationships, but can also be harmful if you do not have boundaries.

Understanding someone and loving them can easily warp into trauma bonding. This is when someone has similar wounds to our own and can make us feel particularly close and connected to them. Unfortunately, this connection can blind people to unhealthy habits and ways of behaving and communicating

You are anxiously-attached

People with anxious attachment seek validation from others. They feel as though being themselves will lead to people abandoning them, so they perform or wear a “mask” of their persona to entice others to care for and accept them.

They feel as though other’s opinions of them are the truth, so they seek to change the narrative of other’s thoughts about them to receive praise. This can make the person fall in love quickly with others because they are constantly seeking their own self-worth from their partner.

 

Jami Carder, BSN RN, CTRC

Jami Carder

Registered Nurse and Certified Trauma Recovery Coach

You have inconsistent love and affection during childhood

In my trauma recovery work, I’ve helped men and women change unhealthy relationship patterns. The issue of falling in love quickly and easily is a common theme among people who were raised in homes where love felt inconsistent or they had attachment trauma (such as the loss of a parent).

As children, and adults, we are hard-wired to crave consistent love and affection. When children are taught that love can be taken away, whether by geographical distance, abandonment, divorce, or emotionally unavailable parents, they are often left with an anxious attachment style. This means that there is an underlying fear of losing love, as well as not ever obtaining love in the first place.

People who tend to fall in love quickly often fall in love with a person who is likely going to do the one thing they fear the most: leave. Many anxious-attachment types tend to feel sparks with people who are similar to their childhood caregivers.

This makes sense, as their childhood caregivers are the ones who taught them what love feels like, and that is anxiety. It’s easy for them to confuse those instant sparks or chemistry for love when in reality, those feelings are really just signs of anxiety. Of course, no one realizes that this is what’s happening.

Meeting someone who has the same energy as our emotionally unavailable parents triggers our attachment response because these people feel so very familiar. And we work hard at keeping this relationship, regardless of compatibility.

Healthy love is not obsessing, it’s not clinging, it’s not anxiety and it’s not fear.

But as far as our brains know, this is what love is. So, when anxious attachment styles find love, they tend to quickly grab it and hold on tightly. They are afraid of the loss of attachment, which they know will inevitably happen.

They unknowingly perpetuate the cycle of disappointment in love by failing to recognize that what they are feeling isn’t love at all. What they are feeling are the after-effects of their childhood conditioning.

It’s only through self-work and personal growth that we learn how our experiences with love in childhood drive all of our adult decisions in relationships. Learning why we have this attachment style is the first step in breaking the cycle of unhealthy relationship patterns.

I’ve had many conversations with people who think there is something wrong with them, as love is never successful. Once they put in the work on connecting the dots of their childhood, many are able to fill their validation needs themselves, which then allows them to show up in an authentic way for healthy relationships.

Instead of continuing to have a quick and intense attraction to others, they discover the joy of a relaxed and easy type of love, one which they don’t have to work so very hard at keeping.

Marissa F. Cohen

Marissa Cohen

Author | Founder, Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy

You experience “love bombing”

In the relationship world, there is a fine line between toxic and healthy partners.

Healthy partners grow love organically, by getting to know each other, recognizing the beauty and flaws of people, and loving them for who they are. Toxic partners, also known as abusers or narcissists, begin relationships with “love bombing.”

Love bombing is a series of actions like grand romantic gestures, that make a person feel loved and appreciated, but to an extreme.

For example, sending a ton of mushy text messages, or showing up where you are with flowers, gifts, candies, etc. It seems like this person is just a romantic and they are really interested in you, but they are actually learning your patterns, tracking your interactions, and learning the best ways to control and manipulate you.

Love bombing releases high levels of dopamine and serotonin, creating a euphoric feeling of overwhelming happiness and love. It is one of the main reasons that people in abusive and narcissistic relationships stay. This process basically forces the person to fall in love so fast and they biologically can’t stop it. It almost becomes an addiction

Fun fact: The same part of your brain that is stimulated when you do drugs, drink alcohol, or smoke a cigarette, is stimulated when you feel love. Love is an addiction.

Megan Harrison

Megan Harrison

Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist | Founder, Couples Candy

You are addicted to the thrilling, euphoric feeling of falling in love

We all want deep, fulfilling relationships. But if you find yourself falling too soon, your heart could be starving for love. Love is often an unconscious attempt to satisfy our hunger for security, identity, and belonging in our lives. Humans have an intrinsic tendency to construct narratives and connect the dots between events to ascribe meaning to our lives.

You could also be addicted to the thrilling, euphoric feeling of falling in love. This comes as no surprise because the brain is essentially designed to fall in love quickly.

During the early stages of a relationship, you’re high on dopamine and oxytocin, and your body encourages you to bond quickly. It helps to make it easy to spend every waking moment you can with your new obsession. Oxytocin is powerful. But it’s also blinding. You’re pledging yourself to another while still under the effects of those early hormones.

Falling in love fast might sound romantic, but it has a dark side too. If you are the type of person to fall in love quickly, you might be prone to avoiding apparent relationship red flags. Some studies have shown that people who fall in love fast are more attracted to those who display ‘Dark Triad’ profiles – Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.

Related: Narcissist Versus Sociopath Versus Psychopath: What’s the Difference?

Should you be concerned about falling in love too quickly? It depends. If you find that the rush of excitement wears off quickly, your brain will soon want a new hit of feel-good chemicals. Do you find yourself continually searching for that high? Do you hurt yourself or others in the process?

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable with someone new and falling in love too quickly can end in a whirlwind of crushed feelings and disappointment for both parties. You will want to make sure you’re falling for someone who’s not only falling for you but somebody who is right for you.

If you fall in love easily, then establishing boundaries is an excellent way to move forwards with a new relationship in a responsible manner. If you constantly spend time with your new partner in the early stages of a relationship, you don’t get to see perspective. Limiting the time you visit your new romantic connection to once or twice a week will benefit the relationship in the long term.

Kathryn Ely, ALC, NCC

Kathryn Ely

Associate Licensed Counselor, Empower Counseling & Coaching

Pick-me syndrome

If you have the belief that you are not enough or you are unlovable, you will always be looking for someone to prove to you that you are enough or you are actually lovable. You will be more focused on persuading someone to pick you, choose you, instead of focusing on what you value in a relationship and what you are looking for in a significant other.

The minute you receive affection or validation, it feels so good that logic no longer rules your brain. The positive reinforcement you feel takes over and you naturally want more of it. You ignore any red flags and dive in headfirst.

For those 25 years old and younger it is easy to fall in love quickly. Before approximately 25 years old, the frontal lobe, or executive decision-making part of the brain is not fully formed.

However, the amygdala, the emotion center of the brain, is fully formed in our teenage years. This makes the highs higher, the lows lower, and it is easy to make decisions based on feelings rather than logic. Think Romeo and Juliet- attraction and love win out over all else.

Kelsey C. Bennett, LCSW

Kelsey Bennett

Licensed Clinical Social Worker, The Golden Mend Psychotherapy Services

You have developed an anxious attachment style

People may fall in love fast and easily for a number of reasons, they both boil down to not having an optimal attachment style. There are four primary attachment styles, anxious, ambivalent, dismissive, and secure. Those who find themselves quickly swept off their feet may be the anxious type.

With this attachment style comes a persistent desire to be connected to that special someone. People with this attachment style may meet someone, feel a connection, and fall in love rather quickly. They may find themselves worrying that their special one doesn’t love them and, therefore, frequently seek reassurance.

These people long to be connected and loved by someone, but often find a partner who is somewhat less clear about their affections. They may find themselves chasing this person, only to feel let down. Why is this?

What causes anxious attachment?

People with this attachment style seek such close attachment, falling in love quickly and easily, often because they seek the emotional connection that they never received when they were growing up.

By and large, this occurs due to a person’s parent being emotionally neglectful in some way. When a parent is emotionally unavailable to their child, the child learns that they must strive and struggle to receive love, connection, and affection.

Children may develop what is known as an emotional deprivation schema. A schema is a way of seeing oneself and/or the world. Children with this particular schema feel that love is difficult to attain and they themselves are not worthy of it.

In adulthood, this translates to individuals clinging to partners, not setting boundaries(or limitations) in relationships, and a need for persistent validation. People with this schema may find themselves immediately attracted to certain people and becoming very close very quickly. They may fall deeply in love, or at least what they believe to be love. The truth is, that immediate attraction is due to the person’s emotional deprivation schema being triggered.

Whenever one falls in love so quickly, it is likely due to this phenomenon. The person with the schema may feel immediately comfortable with this person and believe it was “meant to be.” This is because something about this new person has triggered their schema.

Unfortunately, comfort is not the same thing as love. Moreover, how these individuals are accustomed to feeling loved (due to their childhood experiences) is through emotional neglect of some sort, which is often what they find in their immediate love connection.

What can people do about this?

Awareness is always the first step. People can look at the types of attachment styles, perhaps even take a quiz, and see which they are most aligned with. Once a person is aware of their attachment, they can more easily see potential pitfalls.

Additionally, individuals may consider talking with a therapist to discover where their attachment style comes from, as well as work on associated tendencies. For example, anxiously attached individuals may consider working on boundary setting with themselves and others. These people could take time to consider how they feel about themselves and, if necessary, work on improving their self-esteem as well.

Eric Patterson, LPC

Eric Patterson

Licensed Professional Counselor | Writer, Choosing Therapy

It can be a sign of communication or relational dysfunction

I’m sure people would like to think that they fall in love so fast or so often because they are true romantic who values passion and companionship. In reality, the ability to fall in love quickly could be a sign of some communication or relational dysfunction.

It could be as simple as lower-than-ideal self-esteem or something more nefarious like a borderline personality disorder. Whatever the case, finding the culprit yourself may prove complicated, so people should always work to gather feedback from trusted supports and loved ones. If they come up empty-handed, consult with a mental health professional.

Remember, falling in love feels great, but having your heart broken feels equally terrible.

Charna Cassell, MFT

Charna Cassell

Embodied Leadership Coach and Body-Centered Psychotherapist, Passionate Life

Insecure attachment

Falling in love quickly can happen for a handful of reasons. One of them may be a sign of insecure attachment. Meaning, in the absence of a safe attachment figure, you feel an eagerness to attach to someone and be loved in a non-discriminant way.

On the other hand, the ability to fall in love easily can speak to a wide-open heart that allows in vulnerability and feels gratitude for each moment. Some people are more aesthetic and impacted by their senses–what they see, taste, hear, smell, and touch.

The more connected you are to your body, the more you can feel the range of emotions and sensations that pass through it quickly, which can feel like falling in love. (If you watch the face of a newborn, you can see the uncensored impact of life flooding through as their expression betrays everything they are taking in.)

We can fall in love with the scent of trumpet flowers opening to the night air, the feel of warm water over cold hands first thing in the morning, or the dimensional flavors of cinnamon, cardamom, and coriander in a stew. In other words, falling in love quickly can be a gift.

Michelle Davies

Co-Founder & Editor-In-Chief, The Best Ever Guide To Life

Experts have actually coined a term for the tendency to fall in love easily, and often. ‘Emophilia’ is when an individual tends to jump in and out of relationships (or non-relationships) at an unusually rapid rate. These are the people who believe in love at first sight or who act on their romantic impulses right away.

You are falling in love with the idea of love

The danger of emophilia is that there’s a chance that you are actually just falling in love with the idea of falling in love, instead of a real individual, including the sum and whole of his/her character and personality.

It glorifies decision-making based on chemistry and romantic impulses alone rather than on compatibility and commitment. This can be a hindrance in forming lasting and fulfilling relationships.

Here are the signs that you might just be falling in love with the idea of love:

You are always looking for someone to fill the void

People with low-self esteem and emotional emptiness are prone to falling for the first person who gives them attention. When in a relationship, the tendency for people like these is to become codependent and create toxic interactions by seeking too much validation. That’s why there is a saying which goes “you cannot love from an empty cup”.

You are looking to way ahead to the future

You think too much about the future, instead of focusing on the here and now. This may be triggered by a strong desire to experience a deep connection, which is something yet to be built over time. The secret is to live in the moment and let the process unfold organically.

Your judgment might be hazed

If you claim that you have fallen in love at first sight, then there’s a chance that your judgment might be hazed. There are many cases that strong feelings from an initial impression develop into something deeper. However, it pays to be away that it takes time to get to know someone fully and properly.

The best way to stop falling in love too fast and too easily is to have a healthy set of boundaries. It pays to be a little more cautious at first.

Carmel Jones

Carmel Jones

Relationship Coach, The Big Fling

You confuse infatuation with love

When we develop a crush or lustful feelings for someone, they can be interpreted as infatuation. Those butterflies feel good, exciting, and new. Many people confuse this rush with the feeling of love.

Love is stable and reliable. It’s not always a “rush.”

People who put all the emphasis on that initial rush that occurs when you first meet someone you like are often the ones to fall quickly.

Related: The Difference Between Love and Infatuation

You link self-worth with having a partner

Healthy relationships consist of two well-rounded and developed people. They are not seeking their ‘other half’ because they are self-fulfilled. However, when you think of a partner as your other half or someone who completes you, you are piling your self-worth into that person.

Self-worth is one of the most valuable things each person has. If someone else completes that for us, we are going to want it quickly and in a big way. That’s why people who are seeking a partner to fulfill their need for self-worth fall in love so fast.

You have an inappropriate attachment style developed in childhood

One of the biggest reasons why people fall in love quickly is because they established inappropriate attachment styles as children. When children grow up in chaotic or toxic environments or have suffered from parental abandonment, they learn that these types of connections are normal.

They are prone to fall quickly for someone who will eventually fail them because that is more comfortable and familiar than moving at a reasonable pace. They fall so quickly and easily because they fear that they’ll be abandoned if they don’t “lock it in” quickly and often confuse a toxic situation with love.

Christine Mak

Christine Mak

Lifestyle Coach and Mindfulness Teacher, Soul Paradiso

People’s deepest desire is to connect and love. When they find someone remotely close to the kind of happiness they want, they tend to gravitate or feel magnetize to that person because they naturally want to be happier. It’s part of everyone’s inherent nature to lean more towards what makes them feel good.

Too much eagerness

These people also want to be able to end up with their happily ever after as soon as possible and be able to share their life with someone. Most would want to skip the process of dating the wrong ones and jump right to dating the right one, and in doing so they can jump ahead of themselves by falling in love so quickly due to their eagerness.

Rather than taking the time to assess if the person they are seeing is the right fit for them, they tend to assume that the happiness they currently share in finite moments is a good indicator of something long lasting.

At the same time, they could be choosing to be overly positive about this person by deciding to overlook flaws because they want to choose love above all things. On top of all that, it may have also taken them a while to find someone they actually like, so when they do find someone, they think that this person could be their one, which reveals a bit of loneliness in them as well.

Anxious attachment style

A person’s attachment style also comes into play when it comes to falling in love. The dynamics of the kind of relationships a person had growing up affect the kind of attachment style they have with others as they get older.

If someone is the type to fall in love so fast and so easily, they may have an anxious attachment style. Due to trauma, they experienced when they were younger, such as abandonment or an emotionally unavailable & avoidant caregiver, they could anxiously cling to any level of love they feel or receive with another because of these unhealed wounds.

Sometimes these wounds involve the person needing to prove their own love in order to receive love, hence the anxious attachment to fall in love so quickly and easily.

They also quickly attach towards any kind of love that is any more than what they received growing up because they’re trying to fill up the void of love they lacked. They have never experienced the dynamics of a healthy loving relationship before, so they don’t know how to approach love in a steady way from a place of value and self-worth.

Another reason a person would fall in love so fast and so easily is because the other person may fulfill all their outwardly desires of a an ideal partner. Their love interest could check off all their practical boxes of what they’re looking for, such as looks or being family oriented, that they immediately fall for the person without assessing the actual connection.

Pressure from society

They could also be falling in love with the type of courtship or relationship society portrays as love. A person and their love interest could be dining at restaurants, hanging out with each other’s friends, and do everything that they see couples usually do but lack compatibility.

This person could have unhealthy role models around them that enable behaviors of a quick and fast courtship as well. People tend to follow their peers and what seems to work amongst their age group. Another aspect to this is that their partner could also prematurely promise them a future they know they want, on top of the winning and dining they’ve shared with them.