In our ignorance we called it love. The dream of love possesses some or all of these symptoms but is void of the substance of love's divine and sovereign reality. What tricks us is that love does charm and enchant. Without these elements it would cease to be love. The difference is that the enchantment of true love is deeper, founded upon more certain stuff, that of the spirit, the living tenement deep below the fleshy confines of passion and pleasure alone, for love is spirit.
Love is a living thing.
Real love is accompanied by those subtle and unexplainable fevers, the lightness, and the undeniable ache that you have experienced, for love affects the whole person. And though love's imagined likeness shares some of the same conditions, the difference is that one is a life affirming imprint of God that gives beauty to all common and earthly things around us, the other is but an unsubstanced and unkind shadow, for in the end, it fails us. It proves itself unsubstantial, frail, and as insufficient as a dream. It has left multitudes floundering in the debris and wreckage of inordinate passion, of love denied, leaving the inevitable scars upon our flesh and in the maze and tangle of our minds. This seems to me a good place to start.