Level's Of Love

The word love is certainly one word that will be in any language, and if they don’t, it is truly a sad society that they live in. Love is a word with a multitude of meanings, and perhaps one with no meaning at all. It has a million and one uses, and everyone uses and accepts this word in a different way. We jest with it; we show our affection with it, we show our gratitude with it and perhaps many more.

“I love you”, is perhaps one of the phrases that can have the greatest effect on one’s life. To hear it may consequence of feelings of, gratitude, happiness, jealously, hatred and perhaps even nothing at all. Today a lot of people are talking about types of love, I love you this way, I don’t love you that way. I think some people even consider sexual attraction as love, but just because you want to make out with someone or maybe even do more than that, doesn’t mean you are in love; it just means your hormones are on the fritz. But in my opinion, there are stages or levels of love, and once you fit those criteria there is no type of love. Below are what I deep to be the levels of love;

Friends: Simple friendship is the most common and simplest forms of love. The people included in this level are those who you generally meet but are not a big part of your life, classmates, co-workers, neighbours etc that you are on speaking terms with. You are not generally on close personal terms with them, you don’t really trust them, but you don’t distrust them either. You may not go to great lengths to be helpful to them or watch their back, but you will help them out if it’s not too inconvenient for you. You know what kind of people they generally are, but it’s not like we go sharing our deepest secrets with them either. This love is fragile and easy broken, it wouldn’t take much for one to doubt or turn on the people in this category. But we do love our friends, to some extent.

Best Friends: These are the friends who we have close personal bonds with, you know almost everything there is to know about them, and they know what is to know about you. You trust them with your secrets and in their actions. They are the people who you go for advice to and for help on your endeavours. Usually people have a very limited number in this category; two or three people or perhaps even one. You will generally go out of your way to help them out, and your life is greatly affected by your interaction with them. People do not easily turn on those who they truly consider best friends, and are reluctant to believe any outside comments they may hear. We all love our best friends, but we don’t say it, mostly because it sounds really gay. But we all know it, and once in a blue moon, we even say it.

Family: Family bonds are the hardest to describe. Apart from the fact that its one`s own flesh and blood, how much we love them also depends on many other circumstances. Some relatives may just be our friends, while others maybe our best friends. The bond of blood normally doesn’t hold when considering every relative, one may easily chose his best friend over a cousin or uncle. Blood is in this case insignificant without friendship. However when it comes to the immediate family; Mother, Father, Brother or Sister, in the very end, we do love them more than our friends, especially our parents. We may not know there history or they may not know every secret we have, but in this case the bond of flesh and blood does prevail in most cases over friends.

Love: I think this is the stage most of us ever reach in our lifetime; maybe some of us don’t even believe that there is something above it. This is the love that we feel for our significant others, for that someone special. Although many a people have argued, I do not believe you can love two people this way at the same time. You will love one person more, even if that choice is hard to make. This love is what makes us want to spend as much time we can with that person, the need to go that little extra mile, the need to show we care, the need to be loved. We trust this person to a great extent, we tell this person we love them, and we expect love in return. We expect the person to love us, to be with us, to hold us dear. You would go to a good extent to keep the person happy and be with the person. Although this love is not easily discarded, it goes away with lack of mutual love, trust and even by the bad decisions and actions of the other. One of the main fuel of this love, is to be happy while been with the significant other and making that person happy.

True Love: In this world of cynicism there is an only a handful of people who believe that true love even exists, I am one of them. To love someone with everything you have, beyond with just wanting to be with her. This is a rare occurrence, to selfishly love someone, to want most in the world to keep that person happy. Sometimes a person is so important and loved; the only way to keep them in your life is not to be with them in the usual way when one loves someone. Rather than ranting on let me say something that I may have perhaps even said in a previous post. To truly love someone, is to love her, for all her good, and for all her bad, and ask for nothing to change. To truly love someone, is to be happy that she is happy, to not just simply want to be with her, but to take her happiness as your own happiness. It is to really want to put your well been on the line, if it is to protect her. To think of a life without her in it and to know how empty it would be, to want to do anything and everything you can to keep her in your life, even if it means to never have her as your own. To put up with sorrow you may feel or wrong that may come to you. This is the kind of person you would trust with anything, the kind that would take something of great magnitude to turn your back to.

Undying, Unconditional Love: Whatever many things I maybe, I am no fool, even though I have included this category I do not believe it exists. Love fades, even true love fades. I am not saying it is doomed to fade from the start, I am saying it can fade. To love someone in this way, is to love them forever, despite all odds, despite all hardships, all sorrows, and wrong doings, to love them no matter how shitty or crappy it gets. This is simply not possible, no matter how you love them, even if you truly love them, we all have our limits, and there is only a certain amount of abuse to our life we can take. The threshold may be very high for some of us, but it is still there. You may truly love two or three people in your lifetime, but you cannot love one person forever despite how bad it gets. Again I am not saying you cannot love one person forever, or that it is highly likely that you can’t love one person forever. You just can’t love someone forever unconditionally, without getting any love and happiness and just getting wrong doings in return.

``When I saw you, I was afraid of meeting you.
When I met you, I was afraid of kissing you.
When I kissed you, I was afraid to love you.
Now that I love you, I'm afraid of losing you`` - Anonymous