When you meet someone special and is first falling in love and dating, that time can feel like the sweetest in the world. You are infatuated with each other. You think about them when you’re not with them. You wonder what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, and when you see each other, it’s fireworks. The chemistry is off the charts. You could talk to them for hours and hours on the phone and never want it to end.

A lot of people refer to this stage as ‘The Butterflies’. During this stage, it’s a lot of passion and posturing; it’s time to really catch that other person and show them how you feel. This is the time of romantic gestures: flowers, letters, endless affection, etc. When that fades, it can be hard to take and know how to feel about it. This is a natural progression in a relationship when ‘falling in love’ changes into ‘love’. They don’t sound different, but they are very different stages in the history of a relationship.

Falling in Love

The first stage, the early stage of love, is admittedly many people’s favorites. It’s full of intense emotions, getting to know someone while there’s still a mystery there. You haven’t yet heard all their stories. Your highlight reel of life events and moments worthy of conversation is up and spinning again. You can’t get enough of the person you’re falling in love with, and that early stage is intoxicating. The thing that a lot of people in relationships find difficult to handle is when that stage starts to fade.

Entering Love Stage

When you’ve been with someone for a while, and of course this timeframe is different for every couple, that passion and mystery changes. You know them now, have heard most of their stories, you’ve seen them at their worst and have seen all parts of them. Now you’re really sticking around because you actually fully know and still love this other person; that’s a pretty big deal. It’s easy to stick through the fun stuff, the ‘butterflies, but who sticks around for the hard stuff? Who’s really there when you need them? That’s real long-lasting love, and that’s a magical thing as well.

In ‘Love’ stage, it’s honesty. You are not both presenting sides of yourself to the other person when only when you want them to see them or in a certain light. The make-ups have been taken off, everyone’s seen each other first thing in the morning, and both still want to be there.

In a lot of relationships, it’s often one partner that really tries to catch the other. When stages move from ‘falling in love’ to ‘love’, it can hard for the person that became accustomed to those efforts to see them disappear or fade. It can be hard for that person to have faith that the other partner’s feelings are all still there; they’re just being expressed differently in this stage. They’re being expressed by the day-to-day little things, like bringing you a cup of tea or holding your hand.