The 5 stages of love (Where are you)

If you’ve ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of being in love, you’ll know that it’s NEVER a smooth ride. Every love has its fair share of ups and downs. One day, it can make you feel like it’s impossible for you to contain your happiness but in the blink of an eye, it can leave you feeling completely broken inside.

As confusing as this sounds and as random as it feels, love can actually be classified into 5 distinct stages. If you want to understand love better, if you want to be less confused about all the different feelings you experience, and if you want to find out if your relationship has completed all 5 stages of love, then read ahead:

Stage 1: Falling in love

You meet this new person. You talk for a while but it just doesn’t feel enough. You feel like there’s something more to this random meeting. So you ask them out on a date. One date leads to a few more. And every time you meet, you can’t help but think about how beautiful they look when they smile, you can’t help but be amazed at the way their eyes light up when they’re telling you something about their life, and you can’t help but feel like this person might just be the one for you.
Does this story sound familiar? If yes, then congratulations! You’ve entered the very first stage of love. You’ve experienced how it feels to actually fall for someone.

Stage 2: Coming closer as a couple

In stage two, your love starts to really grow. You start to feel like the initial excitement, laughs, and romance are gradually evolving into a deeper and even more meaningful connection. This new person has taken over your life. They’re in your thoughts. They’re in your dreams. They’re in your everyday life. And you realize that your life no longer revolves entirely around your own self but it has started to revolve around this new relationship as well.
This is the stage where some couples decide to move in together or even get married. It’s the stage where both of you are extremely sure about everything, where you feel that this love will definitely last a lifetime.

Stage 3: Getting disillusioned

All the confusion and uncertainty that accompanies love tends to be the main theme of stage 3. This is the stage where one or sometimes both the partners start to feel unsure about what direction their relationship is going to take. They start to question whether they even made the right decisions in the previous two stages.
This is the stage where you feel like things are starting to fall apart and where everything about this relationship starts to feel wrong, without any specific reason. You find yourself getting angry and resentful about the smallest things. You feel like there’s very less love and intimacy left in your relationship and you start to feel hopeless. All you want to do is bring back the passion, the initial spark or just any kind of chemistry but you just don’t know how to do it.
Passing stage three is not an easy task. Very few couples have the potential to survive this stage but when they do, their relationship ends up getting even stronger and they start to feel more in love than ever before.

Stage 4: Working on a true and lasting love

Once you pass the hard times of stage three, stage four acts as the much-needed reward. This stage begins once you’ve figured out the bottom cause of all the conflict and pain in your relationship and are now working together to resolve all your issues.
The essence of resolving your issues lies in the ability to understand that nobody in this world is perfect. Your partner has lived their entire life with their own share of insecurities, faults and imperfections and so have you. When you want to work on building a true and lasting love, it is necessary for you both to help each other grow, to help each other leave behind all your fears, and to help each other heal all your past wounds. Once this healing process starts for both of you, you’ll feel all the love and passion start to enter your relationship again.

Stage 5: Taking on the world with your love

The world is not an easy place to live in. There are times when you get so caught up with all the stress at work, all the negative people who keep bringing you down, all the problems that never seem to end, that you start to lose hope.
But when you find and build a true and lasting love with someone, you reach this final stage of happiness, this stage where no amount of negativity and no amount of stress can ever bring you down. Because the only thing that truly matters is the fact that you’ll always have this one amazing person by your side!