Being in love in real life is not quite like in highly romanticized movies where all’s well that ends well.
Indeed, movie romances all too often begin with love at first sight which becomes the starting point of a beautiful love story and which subsequently runs, without great complexity, under the sign of happiness.
The cliché of being in love, particularly in gnangnans films, is very far from the reality of our lives which, they do not in the least resemble perfectly smooth love poems with sublime happy endings.
And fortunately ! Because being in love and loving would be much more than that.
Is being in love the same as loving?
So what would it mean to be in love in real life? To love, what is it? To be in love and to love, are they the same?
To love (to love), to be in love (to be in love), to fall in love (to fall in love), to have a crush (to have a crush, love at first sight).
These expressions in French, and which also have their equivalents in other languages such as English, refer to amorous metamorphoses and are, to a certain extent, identifiable.
And yes, saying I’m in love with you is not exactly like saying I love you.
First, we would fall in love, then we would fall in love, then we would be in love and finally we would love.
Stages of love
The process would be more or less long and each step would have its characteristics.
To have love at first sight is in other words to flash on someone. Have a crush on a person.
That said, we could very well fall in love with something or have a crush on something!
It is therefore a primitive feeling, spontaneous, almost uncontrollable, and which is felt in cases where there is a strong attraction towards the other.
It is still quite a rare event.
After love at first sight, we fall in love. We would go to the level that we could qualify as superior and at which the passion in love is built and cemented.
It’s a generally very happy and intense transition during which we get to know each other more deeply, we share a lot together, to the point of forgetting our friends, even our own routines or even our centers of interest!
The boyfriend or girlfriend is at the center of everything.
Falling in love would be like snorkeling in a paradisiacal sea where all the fish are smiling at us.
Everything looks beautiful and easy. Here too, the fictionalized films are right all along and we cannot contradict them.
The next state is when we are in love.
We know each other well enough, after spending a lot of time or quality time in their company. Passionate love is still strong, but it decreases slightly.
Films that follow Hollywood or Bollywood standards, or even soap operas will stop for ease in love. This is the couple’s first happy state of stability.
And this is where it is reproach to these films, series and soap operas for conveying a strongly standardized idea and unfortunately this gives the wrong image of love.
The danger also lies in that this image risks becoming an injunction for the spectator.
Because in reality, the adventure continues even after the idyllic state of love.
Then comes the stage which is the real challenge for every soul mate. This is the challenge of loving.
After the euphoria of emotions felt during the first three stages, the couple takes shape in a more consistent way. Love sets in and begins its path towards its co-construction.
But this is not without difficulties.
Loving would therefore be the challenge stage for the couple. Emotions and feelings have been preconstructed.
It would only remain to see if they are strong enough to stand up to the storms of everyday life, routine, arguments, disagreements, the decrease in physical attraction to each other, stress, personal problems of each.
In short, to love has all the air of a stagnation which does not give much desire.
But this is where the ambiguity and the paradox lie: while everything seems to be building itself naturally, the possibility of collapse lurks like a gray and menacing cloud.
