Dear Prudence,
I’m 25, my boyfriend is 27, and we’ve been together for about a year and a half. We’ve had some ups and downs, but I know that I love him and he loves me. Though we’ve said “I love you” to each other, we have never said that we were in love. So, the other night, I brought it up and asked him if he was in love with me. He responded that he loves me and thinks that our love has grown deeper throughout our relationship, but that he thinks that being “in love” is just the feeling of butterflies at the beginning of a relationship and doesn’t really mean anything. He was honest, but at the same time, it felt as if he sort of dodged my question.
I think of loving someone and being in love as the opposite of what he does—that you love someone at the beginning of a relationship, but you grow to be in love as time passes. I’m left feeling hurt and dissatisfied by his response. When I think about the future of our relationship, like imagining us saying our wedding vows one day, it’s important to me that we feel that we’re in love. I’m sure he could tell I was hurt when he said it, and yet, he didn’t do much to reassure me. The conversation ended there, and we went to bed. Could this really just be a difference of semantics, or could it be an indication that he doesn’t feel as deeply about me as I do about him? If it were the other way around, I absolutely would have affirmed something that I knew was important to him. How should I follow up on this conversation?
—Love or in Love?