I found this in a site and thought of re-blogging it:

What is real Love?

Apart from the feelings you get when hormones such as Phenylethylamine are pumped into your blood, love is an emotion triggered by your subconscious mind to bring you closer to a person whom it thinks is important for your well being.

Here is an example that will help you understand how love happens. Suppose that you were experiencing a down time and that someone kept helping you everyday in getting over your problems.

In this case your subconscious mind will find out that staying with that person improves your mood and so it will make you love him to insure that you are going to stay close to him.

Real love can in many cases be an emotion triggered by the subconscious mind to help you stay closer to people who can improve your mood.

Is this real love?

You might be wondering why would you love that person instead of thinking of him as a great friend.

The answer is simple if that person matched your unconscious criteria, which is a list that a person must meet in order for you to love him, then you will fall in love with him and if he didn't he will just become a good friend.

Real love and compensation

People also fall in love to compensate for their unmet needs. If a girl lacks self confidence then there is a great chance that she will become attracted to confident people provided that all other factors are constant.

This also answers the question about whether people get attracted to those who are similar to them or those who are different than them. People get attracted to those who are similar to them in the traits they like about themselves and those who are different than them in the traits they dislike about themselves.

Some people say that real love is unconditional love where you love a person because of the way he is rather than loving him to compensate for an unmet need.

In real world pure unconditional love is almost non existent and relationships are based on a combination of both conditional and unconditional love.

However the more you shift away from compensation towards unconditional love the more will your relationship become a healthy one and the more likely you will encounter real love.

I think its impossible to have a relation that doesn’t contain those two factors (unmet needs &compensation) but the more you move away from the them the closer you will get to real love.