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How do you distinguish being "in love" vs. "the fog"???

27K views 84 replies 38 participants last post by  lifeistooshort 
#1 ·
How do you distinguish being truly "in love" versus being in "the fog"???
 
#7 ·
That's a very good question and while I think the feelings are similar I think THIS aptly describes the difference. If it's with someone you know is wrong for you (they're married, have cheated multiple times in the past, have an addiction, are abusive, etc.) and you still think you can move foward you're in the fog.
 
#4 · (Edited)
I would say that you could be in a "fog" when you are first in love. I know I was with my husband. I moved 6 hours away after 2 weeks to live with him and be with him. If I was thinking clearly, I wouldn't have done it.

With my AP, we would make plans to be together. We would talk about how he would live with us when we were in the Open Marriage. Then, in the EA, he replaced my husband in my fantasy world.

In truth, my AP would not move with me. He would not out my husband. He would not take me out of my husband's life. Yet, in the fog, I believed he would.

The fog is a deceitful thing. It is everything: happy, rainbows, and unicorns. You can't see in front of you. You are blinded to the one person's whose pain should matter: your BS.
 
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#5 · (Edited)
How so? I'm just being honest.

Well, I did see the typo in my post, but that's about it.

Also, I should say that all this happened in '07. We have recently closed off our marriage. I haven't been in contact with the OM in years. Our marriage is stronger than what it was before. We learned from both of our betrayals, and moved forward.

Trust me, I don't have any excuses for what I did. I was selfish. Plain and simple.
 
#10 ·
That was the reason for my "How So" comment. It just left me bewildered (and I write bewilderment). It didn't make sense to me. The good news is that I caught that typo about him taking my husband's life. Wow. That typo made me look crazy.

But, back on topic, I think we all can agree that the fog is one dangerous, deceptive thing, and that R can't truly happen until the WS is out of it and expresses remorse through actions.
 
#11 ·
Are you married? Love is a choice and anyone that has been married for years and years will tell you that it is a conscious decision to love your spouse. So to answer your question....the difference is anything outside of your marriage that you think is better greener and willing to throw away your vows for someone else...that is the fog.....because people dont think clearly through that time. The stupid "In love" feeling that people speak off....those things do not last....thats a feeling of infatuation that gets us all...I hope that makes sense.
 
#14 ·
A. Infatuation is mother nature's helping hand.
B. Love is a commitment and a desire to be and care for someone.
C. Fog is usually a MLC, which masks as A to the confused.
MLC... in your late twenties/early thirties? :scratchhead:

For that matter, when WOULD you classify it as a MLC? Age range, I mean. And if someone is having any form of sexual contact with someone outside the marriage...while the marriage is NOT open, it is an affair. If there is an emotional connection to someone...which SHOULD be a connection to the spouse, it is affair. MLC or not.
 
#13 ·
To me its fairly easy. The “fog” is more about taking on a belief system of “how you want it to be”. This is often vastly different than how it really is. Basically you devalue or throw out any information or facts that might contradict how you want it to appear. It’s a big old sales job in your head where you are reasoning yourself into an opinion or belief.

“Love” just is.... it is an emotion like “hate”. You can’t ‘reason’ it.
 
#15 · (Edited)
To understand the difference between “in love” and the “the fog” one needs to understand emotions and what love is to some extent. Love is the feeling or feelings produced in reaction to a chemical c0cktail and connections in the brain created in response to external stimuli by association.

In short your brain responds to people & things by creating neural connections that are mediated by specific neurochemicals. Thus when you are reminded of or see that person your brain circuits fire the recognition and produce those feelings. Those feelings are emotions and are a result of the associations previously created. The emotion of love is closely tied with the reward systems of the brain which are also identified with addiction. Addictions produce a strong desire for more and serve to replace other neural connections to other people and things.

Much has been learned about the neurological basis for love in the past dozen years but it is still not fully understood. I have included a link to a review article below for those inclined to learn more. Even though emotions and the basis for them are not fully understood, they are understood well enough to create the generalizations above. These generalizations are enough to explain a significant amount of the emotions encountered in a daily reading of TAM.

Two different aspects of love have been mentioned in this thread, infatuation and long term (true) love. It has been shown that infatuation is linked to the euphoria, eroticism and excitement chemicals (see quote below) whereas long term love is associated with more nurturance, protectiveness, low stress. Two commonly distinct types of love can be understood as extremely different mixtures of the same chemicals. For each individual that you have love for will probably have a slightly different mixture of the chemical c0cktail. For instance family may be high on nurturing and so on. The point is that all types of love from romantic to agape are manifestations of a different mixture of the c0cktail. It’s basically the same chemical bath for everyone you love.

When you recognize this, it also explains that it is possible to be romantically in love with two people at the same time. It is not probable though because several of the neurochemicals including oxytocin actively break neural connections with others. Oxytocin is released via sex through orgasm and is responsible for the nurturing long term bonding components of love.

Now back to the question about the difference between “in love” and “the fog”. If you are married and you are still in love then you are probably at the long term true love spectrum of the chemical mixture. You probably (but not necessarily) went through an infatuation stage with your spouse. However since you may not have been attached to anyone else your new addiction to your pre-spouse may have gone unnoticed except by friends that saw less and less of you because you were then head over heels in love. Friends understand that is what happens often.

Now suppose you are married and in long term love but begin to have feelings for another. The addiction components of the c0cktail propel you to escalate contact as much as possible. Soon you get the rush and excitement and you are infatuated when the other. The escalation of contact from the desire to be with the other leads to a reprioritization of what is important. These new priorities are at odds with the marriage and don’t make sense. Furthermore when the oxytocin kicks in and neural connections with the spouse are replaced with the other then links to those old feelings diminish and disappear. This is often noted as rewriting history of the relationship because the way you remember things has changed and is changing. This is the fog. It is noticed more because it is in stark contrast to an existing relationship. Now if you have lost the love for your spouse you will still go through the steps above but your connections to your spouse have already been lost through other means and it is still the fog.



A review paper on emotion can be found at

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2012) 35, 121–202, Lindquist et. al.
http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lindqukr/docs/Lindquist_etal_BBS2012.pdf

That above link is stale, see:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22617651

http://www.unc.edu/~kal29/docs/Lindquist_etal_BBS2012.pdf


A good excerpt that shows the chemicals involved is:

Similarly, love is arguably a primary affect at the ecological level, associated with intimate displays (contact comfort, pheromones). The subjective experiences associated with love may be associated with a neurochemical c0cktail including high endorphins (euphoria), gonadotropinreleasing hormone (GnRH: eroticism), dopamine (DA: excitement), oxytocin (OXY: nurturance); vasopressin (AVP: protectiveness), CRH (stress); and low serotonin (5-HT: submission) (see Ortigue et al. 2010; Panksepp 1998). Understanding of these systems, their evolutionary and genetic bases, their complex interrelationships, and their communicative role in social interaction is proceeding apace. - Ross W. Buck, Prime elements of subjectively experienced feelings and desires: Imaging the emotional ****tail
 
#26 ·
To understand the difference between “in love” and the “the fog” one needs to understand emotions and what love is to some extent. Love is the feeling or feelings produced in reaction to a chemical ****tail and connections in the brain created in response to external stimuli by association.

In short your brain responds to people & things by creating neural connections that are mediated by specific neurochemicals. Thus when you are reminded of or see that person your brain circuits fire the recognition and produce those feelings. Those feelings are emotions and are a result of the associations previously created. The emotion of love is closely tied with the reward systems of the brain which are also identified with addiction. Addictions produce a strong desire for more and serve to replace other neural connections to other people and things.

Much has been learned about the neurological basis for love in the past dozen years but it is still not fully understood. I have included a link to a review article below for those inclined to learn more. Even though emotions and the basis for them are not fully understood, they are understood well enough to create the generalizations above. These generalizations are enough to explain a significant amount of the emotions encountered in a daily reading of TAM.

Two different aspects of love have been mentioned in this thread, infatuation and long term (true) love. It has been shown that infatuation is linked to the euphoria, eroticism and excitement chemicals (see quote below) whereas long term love is associated with more nurturance, protectiveness, low stress. Two commonly distinct types of love can be understood as extremely different mixtures of the same chemicals. For each individual that you have love for will probably have a slightly different mixture of the chemical ****tail. For instance family may be high on nurturing and so on. The point is that all types of love from romantic to agape are manifestations of a different mixture of the ****tail. It’s basically the same chemical bath for everyone you love.

When you recognize this, it also explains that it is possible to be romantically in love with two people at the same time. It is not probable though because several of the neurochemicals including oxytocin actively break neural connections with others. Oxytocin is released via sex through orgasm and is responsible for the nurturing long term bonding components of love.

Now back to the question about the difference between “in love” and “the fog”. If you are married and you are still in love then you are probably at the long term true love spectrum of the chemical mixture. You probably (but not necessarily) went through an infatuation stage with your spouse. However since you may not have been attached to anyone else your new addiction to your pre-spouse may have gone unnoticed except by friends that saw less and less of you because you were then head over heels in love. Friends understand that is what happens often.

Now suppose you are married and in long term love but begin to have feelings for another. The addiction components of the ****tail propel you to escalate contact as much as possible. Soon you get the rush and excitement and you are infatuated when the other. The escalation of contact from the desire to be with the other leads to a reprioritization of what is important. These new priorities are at odds with the marriage and don’t make sense. Furthermore when the oxytocin kicks in and neural connections with the spouse are replaced with the other then links to those old feelings diminish and disappear. This is often noted as rewriting history of the relationship because the way you remember things has changed and is changing. This is the fog. It is noticed more because it is in stark contrast to an existing relationship. Now if you have lost the love for your spouse you will still go through the steps above but your connections to your spouse have already been lost through other means and it is still the fog.



A review paper on emotion can be found at

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2012) 35, 121–202, Lindquist et. al.
http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lindqukr/docs/Lindquist_etal_BBS2012.pdf

A good excerpt that shows the chemicals involved is:

Similarly, love is arguably a primary affect at the ecological level, associated with intimate displays (contact comfort, pheromones). The subjective experiences associated with love may be associated with a neurochemical ****tail including high endorphins (euphoria), gonadotropinreleasing hormone (GnRH: eroticism), dopamine (DA: excitement), oxytocin (OXY: nurturance); vasopressin (AVP: protectiveness), CRH (stress); and low serotonin (5-HT: submission) (see Ortigue et al. 2010; Panksepp 1998). Understanding of these systems, their evolutionary and genetic bases, their complex interrelationships, and their communicative role in social interaction is proceeding apace. - Ross W. Buck, Prime elements of subjectively experienced feelings and desires: Imaging the emotional ****tail
Addicted to love!


Your post describes it exceptionally well. Breaking the addiction can be a journey all of it’s own full of very deep, mixed and conflicting emotions, massive withdrawal symptoms and many false starts.

I imagine it can at times be like trying to get off of heroin. The drug (of love) makes the person feel really good while at the same time they recognise the amount of harm it does.

Only when the pain overcomes the pleasure associated with the drug does the addict have enough motivation to break the habit the addiction has become.
 
#17 · (Edited)
I say it is the same thing. Same brain chemicals.

Whether it is seen as infatuation or true love is very subjective.

The fact is that this is about brain chemicals oxytocin and dopamine.

I know a BS wants to look as this as being something else and that is all well and good but it is about feelings.

This is an addiction to a person. Folks are wired to bond and fall in love. Period.

Stepping back one can judge this if they like. But typically we bond in friendship which creates oxytocin in our brains. So we love the other person. But we also can love our brother and other folks. At some point when we start getting the dopamine rush of seeing someone this becomes more romantic in nature. This is the in love feeling. This is true whether you are married to someone or not. In fact to separate these is very dangerous becasue it minimizes what is going on. But moving forward, we can then make value judgements about why we love someone in a more rational way. Long term commitment and so on. This does matter of course. I am fine with calling this true love and the other a fog but to the person with the feelings it is the same. They are not thinking right.

Very often people fall in love and get married. One could call this an infatuation for sure. We could say this not true love until they have been happily married for number of years. But saying that people who are divorced after say ten years never were truly in love I say is disengenuous.

trying to determine true love from infatuation is very subjective. I get it. We can make that judgement from afar but I am not so sure how helpful it is. Maybe this can help people recover.

So in that light in my EA after I came out of withdrawal I saw it for what it was. So maybe this is the difference. You can withdraw and come out of the fog and work on the true love with your spouse. This is ok but realize that there is a reason that NC from an AP must be permanent. Ask yourself why that is?
 
#21 ·
I say it is the same thing. Same brain chemicals.

Whether it is seen as infatuation or true love is very subjective.

The fact is that this is about brain chemicals oxytocin and dopamine.

I know a BS wants to look as this as being something else and that is all well and good but it is about feelings.

This is an addiction to a person. Folks are wired to bond and fall in love. Period.
Yes, it is all about the feelings and they are so very real to the wayward spouse. They are driven to act by emotions they don’t fully understand. This is the fog.



So in that light in my EA after I came out of withdrawal I saw it for what it was. So maybe this is the difference. You can withdraw and come out of the fog and work on the true love with your spouse. This is ok but realize that there is a reason that NC from an AP must be permanent. Ask yourself why that is?
Coming out of the fog is going through withdrawal. If you never lost the love for your spouse coming out of withdrawal is enough because you can focus on feeding the connections with your spouse. However for those that had lost the love to their spouse coming out of the fog after the withdrawal leaves them empty and unsatisfied. This is why a lot of reconciliations fail. In this case going no contact is essential because the spouse can focus on rebuilding their love for their spouse which was lost somewhere.

However if the marriage relationship was strong to begin with it is enough to stop feeding the addiction once the fog has ended. The connections with the spouse take precedence again. Feeding the neural connections with your spouse if the important aspect (staying in love). This in itself will diminish the desire for escalating contact with others. In this case one does not need to go NC to make it work out. In the case of my EA the addiction and fog was not strong enough to warrant going NC. Actually, I saw the OW and her husband last night briefly and the old desire for closer emotional intimacy is gone. She is really just a friend now, the fog has lifted.
 
#22 ·
I personally don't believe coming out of the fog is just about withdrawl, sure when you come out of that there is an emptiness that surely is like chemical withdrawl, but if we are talking about affair fog, coming out of the fog means realizing the consequences of your behavior.

It is one thing to be hungover the morning after a good party, is a completely different problem when you wake up hungover, evicted, unemployed and without clean clothes and the only thing you want to do is drink some more to escape the misery of the wretch you've become.
 
#24 ·
I don’t see how anybody can be selfless. Our self is always with us 24x7. We take our self with us wherever we go.

Maybe you mean selfish with good, honourable intent as opposed to selfish with bad, dishonourable intent.


To be selfless means to sacrifice our “self” (our wants, needs and desires, our food of life) really big time, but we can never 100% sacrifice our self, it’s not possible. The more a person sacrifices their self for another the more bitter and resentful they’ll become over time.
 
#27 ·
I personally believe a MLC can happen for some in their 20's - it may not just be the transition between number of years ahead vs behind, rather the amount of life left ahead vs behind. To me each year seems to be going faster than the last exponentially, and so my perception is that I'm running out of years very quickly, plus I don't have a whole lot of longevity based on my family history, I think I started feeling the transition a year or so after my 30th. And it was going ok, but divorce sure has made it feel like more of a crisis.
 
#28 ·
Call it what you want....it comes down to Selfishness and not caring about consequences or anyone else...We all one time or another maybe entertained the the idea of being with someone else other than our spouse in our marriage.....but its what you do that makes the difference in the world. If we all did what we thought was right and what we think feels good without care then this world would be a very different place...granted alot of people do decide to do that...my wife is that example.
 
#29 ·
Take a look at your hot girlfriend. Now, imagine she's horribly disfigured, 400 lbs heavier, crazy as an out-house rat, unable to do a thing for herself and unable to ever do anything for you. Her condition will never improve. Would you still marry her, forsaking all others, yada, yada? If you would, that's love. I believe lust is an emotion that we either have or we don't. We can't really control that. "Love" is a deliberate choice. We think babies are cute but parents who adopt a child choose to love. I like dogs, but the ones I make my own, I choose to love. Because it's my choice, my love doesn't stop if my kids piss me off. It doesn't stop if my dog craps on the floor. It doesn't stop if some hottie at work tries to attract my attention.
 
#33 ·
Whether your heart and your mind fight with each other...at the end of the day you still have to make a decision. Feelings are just that feelings. Anyone married for a long time can tell you that you wont always have butterflies...you wont always want to be around your spouse...but its that daily choice you make that you will love them...through thick and thin...fat or thin....rich or poor....they hurt you or make you smile. Because chances are you will do the same to them and prayerfully they make the same decision.
 
#34 ·
I used to be like you. It lasted me well (I think) in my very long marriage, I was with my wife for over 40 years.

My marriage came to an end when I absolutely listened to the very strong messages my emotions were sending me instead of trying to understand them with logic and reasoning. But before I would listen they had to get my attention by bringing me to my knees.

There’s a whole host of intelligence in our emotions which most can’t even conceive of and many will deny. We just need to listen to them and understand what it is they’re trying to communicate to us. We are differentiated from robots by our emotions.

It’s our emotions, how we feel about things that make us human and you do yourself a disservice by discounting them in the way you do.
 
#39 ·
Being "in love" and "the fog" are one and the same--both are that stage of attraction and intimacy that has no basis in reality b/c there has not been enough time to learn enough about the other to know if they have a character worth your true love.

I'm pretty sure "the fog" is why they say, love is blind.

Remember: you fall in love with personality, but you have to live with someone's character. You only know if it is love if their character allows you to continue having that "in love" feeling, at least occasionally, after a few years together. Most of the time, discovering someone's character flaws will end that feeling and we move on--unless we've made the mistake of marrying before we discover that character. That's when things get really tricky.
 
#55 · (Edited)
Wow...very inciteful and intelligent (in my humble opinion). This hit home with me! I've been married over 30 yrs. and it may end soon? May not? My wife had a horrid affair with my so called "best friend" 12 years ago and the pain has always been lurking in the shadows coming out from time to time because of "triggers". One being that "he" shared my same name so hearing it in bed has ruined me...:(

I fell in love with my wifes beauty, her free spirit, her drive and ambition, and we married young. Although she had good aspects to her "character", I was always concerned by her ability to lie and to make things up. She could tell a story and make things so much bigger than they were that you could have been there and you'd be thinking - that's not what happened at all? She was also always insecure and jealous with no confidence in her abilities always putting herself down.

I believe her "character flaws" are what led her to her ongoing PA, and her ability to lie just made it easier for her. I really had no clue and was blindsided when I found them on a cruise together. I'm not sure why I stayed and through a series of events as well as therapy i now see things for how they really are. Even though I believe she hasn't and could never do this again, I believed that back then, so what do I really know? I think "character" is so important in a relationship! Thanks for this incite, it helps to validate what I'm going through and my desire for a seperation after all this time. I still see her same character flaws that I feel led up to her affair coming out from time to time and it makes me uncomfortable. I f i say anything, she says "I'm just having fun" and then she gets angry with me? Of course the next day it's always like nothing ever happened and we're great...and I'm thinking - Really? What about what just happened last night? I know she's a good person, and I believe she loves me, but sometimes its just not enough:(
 
#43 ·
Actually... if you take a step back and look at it... a lot of cheating spouses use both logic and emotion.
Posted via Mobile Device
 
#44 ·
I wonder if the OP is even still reading this thread? If so.... OP.... what are you feeling about your situation now?
Posted via Mobile Device
 
#46 ·
Loveis not a choice. Commitment is a choice. Loyalty is a choice. Perseverance is a choice. Acting in a loving way is a choice.

Love is an emotion.

All human beings make choices based on emotion. This has been shown by examining patients with head injuries or other forms of brain damage who are acting only from the logic centres of their brains. They are paralyzed. They can't make the simplest decisions because the countless choices we make every day very often don't have any logical difference.
Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions - USATODAY.com

That's an oldish study, but there have been others since. There was a good podcast, I think on This American Life about it.
 
#47 ·
Lyris,

I respectfully disagree. If love is not a choice, then how could Jesus command his disciples to love? How could anyone vow to love their wife if loving was not a conscious, deliberate choice? I believe Love is a verb. It's not something that either hits us or it doesn't. It's a deliberate course of action we take. I can choose to love my wife or I can choose not to. Don't believe it? A man is married and allegedly in love. Seemingly out of nowhere he happens to become interested and then involved with someone else. Next thing you know, the wife he would have described as perfectly fine 6 months ago, he now describes as a barrier to his happiness. She's the same person. Or, the guy who was a perfect father for the past 15 years, during a divorce, his wife accuses him of being a child abuser. He's the same guy. In both cases, their emotions changed because the players deliberately chose to think of their mates in a totally different way. They had to. People must justify to themselves everything they do. If you treat your partner poorly, you have to tell yourself you no longer "love" them and they are unworthy of your love. If you behave lovingly toward someone enough (a newly adopted baby, a new boyfriend), you must convince yourself that you actually do love them and that they are worthy of that love. Nobody wants to believe they are evil or stupid. In most of the world and throughout most of history, couples didn't get married because they fell in love but because their parents arranged the marriage or they married what was available in order to survive. Yet, most of them ended up really feeling love for each other. Behaving lovingly was the choice and feeling lovingly came later as the natural consequence of daily justifying to themselves their behavior.
 
#48 ·
^ For me love is most definitely a feeling, that feeling of being in love. And then out of that feeling we enact our love with the things we do with and for our loved one.

I think the love you talk of is the dutiful and responsible love we have for our parents, children, aged Aunts and Uncles etc. For sure we have a duty of service and care for all the members of our family including our wife but we only ever feel romantic, passionate love and sexual desire for our wife. The love we have for our wife is a different type of love to all other loves.



I feel rather sorry for you that you’ve never actually felt “in love” with your wife. You will have missed out seriously big time on immense joy, happiness and pleasure but then again you’ve also avoided a lot of unhappiness, despair and pain.



When my wife caused me pain yet again and wouldn’t change her ways I then took the choice to withdraw my love from her. To put a stop to my loving actions, being concerned about her, helping her etc. I doubt though that the feeling of love I have for her will ever go away although now it is greatly diminished and I know I’ll never stop being in love with the woman I married.
 
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