The Stages Of Love Throughout Your Life

Just like magic, love is such a mysterious and amazing feeling. It’s a powerful emotion that can drag statues and make impossible things feasible. Love is utterly wonderful that it makes someone believe in dreams; it can change and mesmerize someone like art and at the same time, can break a heart.

At the age of 1 (one) – love is the gentle caress we receive from our parents. It’s the magic touch of God that raised us from a single cell to an innocent little human being. It’s the joyful moment of being an infant, and the glorious reward we bring to the ones who gave us life. Love was being tightly embraced and protected from the harmful world, and love was about being danced in a lullaby as we fall into a deep sleep.

Love is playfulness at the age of 5 (five). It’s the smell of sweat and the rushing of breath as we jump and run played and cried. Love is innocence and endless hanging out with our childhood friends. Love was holding our parents’ hands and going out shopping for toys and anything beautiful in our eyes. Love was trying on new clothes and shoes, as well as going to the zoo or amusement park.

Then at 10 (ten), Love is about learning. It’s when we learned to read, write and communicate in a more sociable level. Love was memorizing the multiplication table, practicing addition and subtraction, as well as studying division. Love was understanding the tricks of math, the wonders of science and the stories in history and literature. Love was focused on education and fun doing collaborative activities.

At 15 (fifteen), it got slightly more intense. It’s when love meant falling for your seatmate, for the first time. It’s the puppy-love as others describe it. That funny little feeling that is aggressively growing. It was innocence and curiosity mingling together, joining forces and creating a completely different and vulnerable person. Love was truly a mystery at this point – it was the craving for understanding and the need of being understood. It was the stage of wanting to fit in, and the phase of life where we think we are matured enough to drive our own wheels.

Then came the intimidating phase of Sixteen to Nineteen. Where we ride the crazy waves of falling in love when our hormones spike so high that it got truly hard to rationalize. When we thought what we feel is truly a love of a lifetime. This is the stage when we are so sure of our decisions, so foreboding and unyielding. This is when we feel like we’re ‘adulting’, and yearned for independence.

Now knocks the moment of being 20 (twenty), where everything else became vague and difficult. Life felt miserable and confusing, and everyone who walks into our lives ended upstaying temporarily. It was when we encountered people who bluntly rejected and turned us down. Where we finally learned to genuinely like someone who can’t like us back, and when we loved so deeply and ended up getting drowned to rock bottom. This was the year of growing up, and the year of finally realizing that we can’t have everything we want. Twenty was a total hit to our ego when we were forced to grow up and become mature enough to make sense of our lives. In fact, Love at Twenty was the beginning of real life.

At 25 we realized how love changes through time. Its meaning becomes more significant as we walk through the path of life. Love is now tangled with happiness, and happiness means something more. Something special, and something indescribable. Love at 25 is about understanding oneself, it’s about understanding the simple things and appreciating the tiny little dots that connect every event of our lives. Love is about watching the setting of the sun and seeing the moon own the night. Love is the act of appreciating our whole being, and the journey of finding someone who can see our worth.

As of now, love is still a mystery. It’s the sympathy and loneliness we feel when our parents cry. It’s the broken heart we incur when we lose someone dear to us. It’s the fear of being left alone, and the sorrow we feel when people betray us. Love has a deeper meaning now, it’s about working a career we don’t even have passion for, it’s about making a living and making both ends meet. Love means keeping a job to be able to provide for our family and be able to have something in times of need. Love means working for something we badly want in life and sharing our joy to others. Love is now depicted to be both negative and positive, joyful and sorrowful.

Love is about “not understanding what love truly means” – because love has no boundaries, nor are there actual explanations for it. Love is more than just a complicated emotion now. It’s the darkness and emptiness we feel deep inside. Love is everything that makes us up. It’s the happiness, the pleasure but never the pain – because no matter how mysterious and surprising love becomes, love never hurts… it has always been something else that makes loving painful. In all the stages and walks of life, love was the beautiful dream and magical illusion everyone yearned and still yearning for.

Does “Love” change as we grow?

Love was something we receive when we were young and turns out to be something we give as we grow up, and later we realize it is something shared. We never realize that the magic of love is evident in every stage of our lives, and we fail to admit that love never changes – only we, changed. We dare seek a kind of love we aren’t even willing to give and reject another type of love we thought we don’t deserve.

The value of love is consistent as we mature and grow, yet we fail to realize it because we don’t realize the different stages of life and love that both progress together, alongside each other.