Difference Between Like and Love

Key Difference: Two of the most common emotions or feelings like and love have been experienced by people around the world. We are familiar with the distinct difference between both the words like and love, but we sometimes fail to understand what that difference is and end up interchanging and wrongly using the two terms in our daily lives. Where like means finding something agreeable or satisfactory, the meaning of love is an intense feeling of affection.

There is a clear difference between both the words. You like the person/thing you love, but that does not mean that you love the people/thing you like.

Like

Many things in our lives attain the status of our liking i.e. we like them. Most of the times outer appearance or inner traits are the basis of our likes or liking something. If you like someone, it is likely that you have a sense of respect Like for him or her, and usually the feeling would be mutual. And you tend to agree with them on a majority of things. The word like can be defined in the sense that it is a positive feeling but not always strong. For example, you may like having chocolates, but you can’t say you love it, or you may like desserts, but you may not love eating them.

Love

We use the word ‘love’ instead of the term ‘like’ for things, we like from the bottom of our heart. When you really, really like a thing it attains the status of love. For example, I love painting.

The word love puts an emphasize on how much we like something. Love expresses very strong (or the strongest level of) feelings towards someone or something. To say, I love something/someone, means in our opinion, it is the best. Love

To express positive feelings or opinions like and love are the most commonly used words. The strength of our feelings or opinions is where the difference between both these lie.

The level of affection you have for something or someone is the measure which differentiates the two feeling of like and love. When you like someone/something, you feel happy when they/it is around. But when you love something/someone, you find it very difficult to live in their absence. Where love is unconditional, liking is conditional. Developing the feeling of love towards something/someone may take time but like is an instant feeling.

The word "like" is a weaker version of the word "love," regardless of context. Most people use the term to refer to the people, places and things they enjoy, but don’t feel so strongly about.

	Like	Love
Meaning	Like means finding something agreeable or satisfactory.	Love is an intense feeling of affection.
Intensity	Like is not as stronger an emotion as compared to love.	Love is a stronger emotion/feeling.
	You feel happy when they/it is around.	You find it very difficult to live in their absence.
	Conditional	Unconditional
	Instant feeling	The feeling may take time to develop.