In the last few days, I have talked about love with two people who affect my life in one way or the other. The talk which was left incomplete once felt more than complete the other time. Now I feel the need to write about it. To write what I feel about love and so does it goes here.

An introduction is necessary for every piece of writing, but I have eliminated that part intentionally and would rather like to talk about how to read this piece of writing. Firstly, I have kept this article limited in the simplest of the words and combinations, devoid of examples, a little abstract, so it would require your brain to think while you read along. Secondly, this is for people who have ever thought about love, mind it I am not talking about their love life or loved ones, but only love. Thirdly, if at any moment, while reading this piece, you stop getting the feel, just leave it, because the lines that would follow, will be just piece of shit for you. Please do not try finding any literary pleasure in this writing. That is it! I will head start from the very next line.

Love in normal life is felt in various forms. Even then, when we hear the word love, the first one we think about is in between opposite sex, and is what would be the easiest to visualize. This writing will hence be more concerned with the case of love between the opposite sexes, but yes, it is same in all forms of love. I divide love into stages, as many other have done, and all of our human love falls in one or the other stage, and all love passes these stages, though may end up at a few.

The first stage of love is sex. I would like to remind you I mean abstract sex, and it encompasses a number of types of feelings. Anyways this stage of love is very short, with exceptions going hand in hand. The feeling of sex is with everyone and yes, there is no exception to it, not even one. All the chill, passion, pounding heart or whatever you name, feelings that arise whenever you touch, arises out of the sex quotient of this stage of love. This stage is generally very easy to cross. The day physical expectations take the form of touch, unsaid touch, the stage starts reaching its end. Since, I would be more abstract afterwards; I need to include a crude example here to start giving you a feel. Say there is a boy, obviously in love with a girl. He cares her cheeks for the first time with the back of his hand, may be for the first time in his life, his hands may tremble, his hand reaches her neck, he may go wild, and his heart may start pounding and may be he gets nervous, but whatever is the case he will seek the need of the feeling again and again. With time, both the partners get so used to each other’s touch that the exciting feel disappears and comfort steps in.

The next stage is when a person starts falling in love with the image of the other person. Initially, the image overlaps with the person, but later it separates out. In this stage of love, a person is in love with overlapping image of the person. The person makes out an image, an incomplete image, which seeks its elements from the loved person’s actions. This stage is full of emotions, sentiments but happiness is just a part of it. As the time passes, the image becomes complete. This stage, with a complete image, is the most volatile. All feelings of happiness, pain etc. are at its maximum when the image is complete, reason being the expectations, mismatch of the expectation between the actions of the person and the image which was built. As the stage matures, the complete image starts separating out of the person and feelings start to diminish or rather start converging towards satisfaction. One thing that needs to be explicitly said is that a person falls in love with the image, not the person. Once in our lives we go through this stage when we love an image and not the person, whether it be sexually, emotionally or sentimentally. Anyways, this is the most common stage among all the stages of love.

The third stage of love starts when the image totally separates out of the person. The actions do not matter anymore, the image is complete. This is the most interesting stage among the stages of love due the variants it has. This stage, in most of the cases, is also the shortest stage of all. Serious love as many people term it, then break up, passes through this stage too. A person reaches this stage too fast without even realizing it, then starts generating a new image altogether and reaches back to the previous stage when another person starts fitting well into that image. In the core cases, this stage becomes the longest and person is totally into the image. It is the time where a person may even kill the person being in love with or without feeling any pain or may not feel hard on break up, or may even be comfortable seeing the person being in love with, sleep with someone else. This is the kind of height of ‘love falling’ in this stage. Personally, this is the stage which I actually call as love. Undemanding, unquestioning and spiritual.

A hybrid of the second and the third kind of love is single sided love, as it has been termed. A person creates a dynamic image and keeps hibernating between the two stages of love, unless the love does not remains single sided or the love reaches the third stage of love completely i.e. with a complete image. The most interesting part of this hybrid is that, break ups happens here too, though are similar to the one of the third stage, where the break ups are not due to expectations but because of the awareness of the truth.

The fourth stage is the stage when a person falls in love with moments, moments of satisfaction spiced up with moments of happiness. Most of the people realize this stage of love only when the love is lost. I’d say that losing love is not mandatory at all, but realization comes only when we lose it. After continuously loving the image, the image starts becoming the part of one and it no longer remains something other than self. A person does not see, imagines or visualizes, the image is lost. The person starts getting sweet feelings, feelings of happiness and satisfaction from the moments that happened between them. One thing that I need to make clear here is that satisfaction incorporates pain. The most interesting part about this stage is, the person does not even need to be with the person being in love with anymore, forget about the actions. The person being in love with, if exists in life, becomes a medium to recall the moments, just a medium, a catalyst.

The next and the fifth stage of love is the stage when the person falls in love with the feelings, the feelings of the moments. A person needs to recall the moments, whether consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously to get the particular feel and in this stage of love, this need is lost. You do not need moments to feel love, its just there, all the time. Just imagine the case when you are always high, like you are high when you consume alcohol. What if you always feel high whether you are under the effect of alcohol or you are not. People may argue that this stage may actually bring no feeling, but that is not true. Feelings are lost with continuous feels, this stage is reached in between the cycles of feels, it is just one feel that lasts, mostly subconsciously.

The last stage of love is of being blank, just blank, amongst a void, in an everlasting feel of inner silence. I do not have proper words to describe this stage since it starts where words start to end or rather our language is incomplete to describe this stage. This stage comes altogether for all the love in a person’s life. Everything feels same or rather nothings feel at all. You can call it nirvana of love probably. Fuck me, I do not have words for this stage, still I am in the stage of visualizing this stage and I am stuck in a pale from where I am not able to get out of the box, sorry for that.

If you love somebody, you keep on saying,“I love you, I love you,” and you enjoy saying it. In the beginning the other person may feel happy, but sooner or later the thing is going to be too much. You are making a beautiful word useless. Don’t use it too much. Then it is significant, then it carries some meaning. In fact those who are really in love may not use it at all. If the love is not shown by itself it cannot be said, there is no need to say it. If it is shown by itself, then what is the need to say it? There should be a few key words which you use rarely, very rarely. They should be kept for rare occasions, when you touch a peak, when you are high.

This is all how I classify love and probably see love. I can fill pages on the details and can provide with supporting examples, but probably that will make your imaginations bound with rules, so I thought it would be better to leave the imagination part to you. You must have perceived the writing to the level of thought process that has passed your life and I know if you have felt love more than me, you would have already realized what I wanted to express through this piece of writing. In that case please do enlighten me with your thoughts too. For the people who read anything that comes their way, and have read this without any feel, go get a life. Lastly, lucky you, who survived until the end and that too with the feel or with more feel than mine, thanks for reading this piece, and laughingly yes, if you are a female, do contact me!