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Falling in love with someone isn’t the hard part. It’s finding someone that is just as in love with you as you are with them.
For me it is very hard. Only happened to me once when I was 29 with my ex-boyfriend of 10 years ago. That was the only time I felt a strong connection. It was easy to be with him, we had so many shared interests. He was (is) a good guy. The thing is that many people break up fighting and they kind of go from love to hate or at least dislike and maybe that helps them to be ready for the next relationship. But with my ex I have nothing bad to say about him. Of course he is not perfect but he is a good person. With the others I really don’t care if they are there or they leave and I never miss them because the emotional connection and compatibility wasn’t there anyway.
Once for me. Met the love of my life working in a restaurant. I was a new cook, she was the waitress. First day on the job (1975), she put a ticket on the wheel, I looked at her and BAM! Maybe it was lust at first sight, but it turned into love in short order. We met on May 9, lived together for a year and married May 9, 1976. 44 years together, no end in sight.
I think that this is largely a matter of one's own perception and what various terms mean to them. Lust, infatuation, New Relationship Energy (NRE), limerance, "loving" versus being "in love with", even feeling a kind of love for someone you don't even like...there are so many shades to it.
I don't like the way that situations often are used to invalidate emotions. If you feel love for someone but they don't reciprocate, it's often dismissed as having just an infatuation. Likewise if it doesn't work out to have a long term relationship, as opposed to when it does... If things go well and you get your happily-ever-after fairytale relationship, you are allowed to say that it was "love at first sight" or that you "fell in love" if you want, but if it doesn't, then it was ~just~ lust or infatuation? I don't think so. I won't be invalidating my feelings, just to get over someone, I don't need to diminish how I felt in order to do that.
And I also don't think that love has to be scarce, in order to be valid, valuable, precious and wonderful. I don't think that love needs to be permanent, either, to be valid. I don't believe that love is one specific thing. It's got as many shades and flavors as there are connections between myself and others, and I can value them all for whatever they are worth...in the moment, or in a memory. I do not consider my love to be cheap just because it is fairly plentiful, either.
Of all my partners, I fell in love with 7 of them. 14 of them, that I know of, fell in love with me. Only once has it happened that I, and another person, were similarly and simultaneously in love with one another, and I'm still in a relationship with him.
Well you had me nodding in agreement (in a tl;dr kind of way) right up until the surprise ending... It’s so very different for everybody, isn’t it?
A big part of what makes me think I’m in love with somebody is the way they are responding to me. The way they make me feel. If they didn’t make me feel like they loved me, I can’t categorize that as being in love with them. To me, that’s being in pain, not love.
I’ve been in love 3 times. The first I married, the other 2 ended due to nothing that had to do with love, but circumstance.
I don't think anyone really can define one or the other. Love when it is returned and Infatuation when not reciprocated is what I've observed in others.
I have a small group of people in my life that I can honestly say I love them.... so the number here is irrelevant. It is love in varying degrees.... The loss of anyone of those people would be devastating to me.
Now if I were to narrow it down to those that I had serious long term relationships with.... 2.
No regrets to any of my loves... that makes me feel a bit fortunate.
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) right up until the surprise ending... It’s so very different for everybody, isn’t it? 
