The Evolution of Love

This post is by Jane Sheeba of Find All Answers.

Love dwells everywhere. It is the cause and the purpose of why we came to life and why we are living. Love is something universal. Right from the day we are born (even before it actually) till the day we die, love spreads throughout our lives.

Although love is universal, it takes different forms during different stages of our lives. Or to be precise, our perspective on love changes as we evolve. As we live our lives and experience different things, the way we give and experience love also changes. Since relationships are built on love, they too take different forms as we evolve.

The new-born love

The very first form of love we experience is as a child, yet we don’t give much love even to our parents, because we don’t know yet how to give love. Probably, all we know is to get fed, sleep, and poop. At this stage, however, every touch matters. Love is conveyed to the baby through the touch of the mother, and—who knows?—maybe the way the baby touches the mother could also be a form of love. For the first three months the baby doesn’t recognize faces. After that the baby smiles back at the mother (at least in the first place) and reciprocates the touch and other caring moves.

At this stage of life, love is communicated not only through touches but also through the natural blood bond between the parent and the child.

The child love

When the baby becomes a child who gets to know things, there comes a little difference in the nature of love. The child’s understanding of love is improved a little bit: s/he recognizes the parents by face, and now knows who will protect him or her. The child may or may not be obedient; this doesn’t directly relate to love.

The teen love

Here occurs a rather big jump. Love at this stage branches out beyond parents to take in friends and society. Friends, to many teens, are gods, and they think love is easily understood, shared, and reciprocated only among people of their age. They begin to feel the generation gap, which was likely quite negligible until now. Some distance and separation appears between the teen and the parents. This is natural—it’s nothing to worry about.

Of course, more than 70% of teens translate love to sex. There is nothing wrong with this, since sex is nothing but ‘making love’—something that helps humans to express love. So sex can be translated to love, but lust can’t.

The wedded love

When the teen finds Mr. or Mrs. right, life moves on, and the teen decides to start a new family. Now most of the love is shared between the couple, and hence parents get a very small share. The husband and wife do things to please each other, and make sacrifices. Love dwells in the very fact that they have become a family and they live, earn, save, and do everything for the well being of their family.

The parent love

The individual now sits where their own parents sat: now they know how hard it is to bring up a child. It needs sacrifices, pain, extra work, added commitment, endurance, and many more things. The parent spends sleepless nights, answers their kids’ crazy questions, teaches them lessons, makes them learn the good and the bad, stands beside them, sacrifices some of their own comfort and happiness for that of the children, and so on. Even though all these tasks are tiresome, the parent experiences an inner joy that cannot be explained.

Now the parent gives a different type of love back to their own parents, since they know how much their parents would have gone through to bring them up!

The grandparent love

The individual’s heart is probably full at this stage. After they have given so much love to others in life, they now begin to expect some love and care; that’s quite fair. Some get it, while others don’t. The person’s perspective on love becomes so mature that their joy not only depends on the amount of love they experience, but on the love their loved ones experience.

Which stage are you at now? Has your perspective on love changed or evolved as you’ve grown? What does love mean to you right now? Have I missed any stages? Please add your thoughts in the comments!

Jane Sheeba, a relationship expert, is the one behind Find All Answers. She can pump ideas out of her head to help you with issues on self-improvement, relationships and blogging tips. She has a free ebook for you to grab.