I like to think ive felt it but now i question whether it was real due to what i now know about that relationship
Your feelings can still have been true even if you now realise they were based on misconceptions.
It is about your own feelings as opposed to some external 'truth'. It's just neurotransmitters reacting to different stimuli, even though it's easy to interpret it as something objective and transcendent when these feelings are triggered by social interaction with someone you're attracted to.
I think of love like when you discover a hobby or pastime and, when it's new, you want to do it all the time, you while away your time in work waiting to get out to go and do your hobby, you read all about your hobby and think about it when you're supposed to be doing other things. It's that utter bliss you feel when you're doing it.
Then, as time goes on, some hobbies fall by the wayside and you realise when you get really into them, they're not actually the hobby for you. Maybe you're just not suited to it, it's not your forte, perhaps you're just not ready for it at this point in your life.
But some hobbies make your life so blissful that you carry on doing them. And you move from it being something new and exciting to it becoming a permanent part of your life - it becomes part of who you feel you are, because it still brings you so much joy and it never feels like hard work like some of those other hobbies you tried did.
I've had loads of hobbies that seemed amazing to start with and I genuinely thought they were going to be my whole life. But the reality was very different and many didn't work out.
It doesn't mean the hobbies I've stuck with don't bring me bliss. And even if the other ones I remember as super-exciting had got to this stage, the initial excitement would have worn off by now into a comfortable part of my life anyway. But those hobbies weren't right for me anyway as they didn't even get that far.