Is it merely a matter of symantics?

To love another and/or to be in love with another...

I do not know what this means. It was a question put forth by a contemporary of mine at a time when I thought I knew what I was talking about. It was obvious that I loved, but not so obvious whether I was "in love" or not. The question, alas my friends, I could not answer honestly, and it really threw me into a funk when you come right down to it.

Is it not enough to love someone? Is there something more that I have been missing?

I will have to analize this question using specific instances in my experience where love is concerned to really get to the bottom of this sticky business.
When I was a teenager I felt passionately about things to such an extent that all things became sort of black and white. Not literally, of course, but in concept. I fell totally "in love" (for that is how I felt about it at the time) with this teenaged girl who, being as young as myself, eventually found interests in other things and people.

I was a phase for her as she was for me. I was completely devastated by her decision to break up with me and did not know exactly why it hurt so badly, nor did I have any concept of life without her prior to her leaving me. It should also be mentioned that I have felt this same way about other women since then, but only in obsessive infatuations; never in relationships that I have been able to function in or be in any way natural or happy. I had always assumed that these "crushes" were simply me wanting what I could not possibly have.

Today the advent of an adult perspective has made it so I can honestly say that she filled a deep need for me that really had nothing to do with love as I understand it now, but had much more to do with a deeply rooted emotional cavity that had been there since early childhood. Some sort of comfort and companionship that I had lost through time and growing older. If you will pardon the Freudian allusion; one cannot continue to suckle momma indefinitely, and this does pose some very weird and unsettling problems in (in my own experience) the young adolescents life.

So that would make sense to me that being "in love" is the rough equivalent to somehow filling the vacuum left from the detachment from the mother, which would also make sense why I lost track of what the difference of love and being in love was after time; being "in love" is a euphamism for something more profane than the psyche can handle.

No sane male wants to go the Oedipus route consciously, and the implications of it are too much to bear so we come up with these complex and (im my humble opinion) unacheivable constructs to trick ourselves that it is something grandiose and pentultimate when in all actuality, we are merely engaging in a co-dependant game played for ages in the world of abandonment for the sake of a better job or a satisfying adult experience sans children...

Perhaps this is in all of us and what I have thought up here is true. Perhaps I am a twisted, dirty youngish man. Who can say but those who aren't me anyway (so to hell with them)?