A few months ago, one of my friends and I got into a conversation about my dating habits. My friend thought my problem was that I constantly confuse lust for love. This made me think maybe he was right; maybe that has been my problem for years. This would explain why, in just a few short years, I have been hurt so many times. It's not that I really cared about all of these people; it was that I was confusing the physical attraction and this intense emotional desire to want to be with them, with love.

I think many of us have a hard time separating lust from love. This is because some of the characteristics are so similar it's easy to get them confused, so it's important to look at the definition of both love and lust.

According to the Merriam- Webster dictionary, love is "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties." The dictionary defines lust as to "have an intense desire or need: crave; specifically; to have a sexual urge." Evidently, the definitions alone can differentiate the desire associated with lust, and the affection that relates to love.

When you love or lust for someone, there is a constant feeling of wanting to be with them, so it makes it difficult to separate the two emotions. A way to help you tell them apart is the context of the time you want to spend with them. If you want to spend that whole time being physical or intimate, you are most likely experiencing lust. If you just want to spend time with them and you don't care what you do — you could be watching a movie or simply doing homework together — that's love. Granted, sharing popcorn and gazing into one another's eyes doesn't mean a trip down the aisle, but it seems more likely that a couple that simply enjoys one another's company could potentially fall in love.

Another way to tell the two emotions apart is how you describe the person. If someone were to ask you about your girlfriend or boyfriend, and the first thing you mention is their physical appearance — for example, "You should see him without a shirt," or "She is so hot" — then this is probably lust. If the first thing you describe about them is their personality, their brains and all the things you have in common, and not so much their physical appearance, then it's likely more than lust you're feeling.

Another question to ask yourself: Have you always wanted this person, or did you want them once they became unavailable? We always want something we can't have, we create an intense desire to acquire what we want and that intense desire might get confused with love, but that is lust. Have you ever decided to cut carbs and found yourself fantasizing about pizza, drooling at the sight of it, even though you never really enjoyed it that much to begin with? This is a want, a desire; this is lust.

When something happens to the person you are dating, and the first thing you think about is how it affects you, for instance if they get sick and your first thought is that you may not be able to have sex for an entire week and how much your life sucks, this is a sign of lust. If you feel bad, wonder how they are feeling and take care of them and bring them soup, this means that there is much more than a physical connection, there is an emotional one as well, and that is what love is.

So why is it important to know the difference between love and lust? Lust is an initial attraction. Love is what keeps you together.