Passionate Love vs. Stable Love
We can categorize passionate love as the kind of love that we experience when we fall in love. It’s the phase in which we get to know the other person. It’s when we feel like we need to see them and spend time with them.
It’s in this first phrase that we feel those butterflies floating around in our stomachs. They’re a well-known result of the nerves of getting to know the other person.
However, we can sometimes confuse falling in love with actual love. On certain occasions, this confusion can crumble when a stable love emerges as the days of passionate love are numbered.
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Passionate love doesn’t last forever
The movies, the advertisements…what others tell us make us believe that passionate love is true love. We believe in a love that effortlessly has an undying spark, all by itself.
However, this isn’t real. Passionate love doesn’t last forever. If we measure passionate love as the time it takes to fall in love, it usually lasts for a period of around 6 months to a year.
Living forever with that kind of excitement is unimaginable. As soon as we get to know our partner better and we start living with them, those feelings will inevitably change.
There’s no doubt about it. Relationships change, and yet people greatly fear this.
Routine, less sexual encounters, changes, arguments, thinking that our partner needs to know exactly how we feel about something… All of this starts to dissipate the excitement of living together as well as the belief that love always has to have a glowing flame.
In fact, many couples mention “everything was different in the beginning” or “if only we could go back in time”.
It’s impossible to go back to the past, and there’s no reason to be scared of what’s to come. Mature love, the stable kind of love, is a step towards the unknown, beyond passionate love.
Stable love: real love?
Contrary to passionate love, stable love can last a lifetime. It’s a love that’s built carefully day by day, with consideration and attention from both ends of the relationship.
With this mixture of ingredients, stable love is more relaxed because the ties that bond the couple are stronger.
However, mature love frightens many people because they associate it with routine, or getting too comfortable. In addition, they might see it as a lack of passion and time together, and especially as a lack of interest.
We don’t have to think like this. Furthermore, when a couple reaches the stage of mature love, they’ll realize several things:
- They need to strengthen their love each day,
- Their desire to be with each other won’t wane regardless of time,
- They’ll be very aware of how to enjoy the intimacy that they share with each other.
However, many couples don’t reach this kind of love because mature love requires that both members of the relationship are certain that they want to be with the other. In order to reach that kind of security, they need maturity.
The love that they didn’t tell us about
All the couples that have reached mature love realize that there are a lot of hearsay and myths revolving around what love actually is as well as expectations for relationships.
The reality is totally different and, possibly, might not meet the expectations that we have. It’s a heavy responsibility to undertake.
Of course, in order to even reach mature love, one has to fall in love first. From there, they go through a honeymoon stage full of nerves and butterflies that make us all go a little crazy.
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However, the important part comes after when the love goggles come off, when the butterflies flutter away– when we’re alone with our partner.
It’s then when the long road opens ahead of us. It’s when we can look at our partner and answer the question: Do I want to continue growing and sharing my life with this person?
