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Romance and Love


Bogart and Bacall


Romance and Love
Romance swells our hearts and souls. We long for love, yearn for love, hunger for love. Our American culture surrounds us with images, movies and stories of love. Writers and poets have written stories about love from time immemorial.

We mark our lives by stages of love. Our first kiss, our first date, our first love, our first heartbreak fill our adolescence and early adulthood. We spend the rest of our years waiting for love, loving or grieving lost love. Romance is part of our human existence.

I asked a rhetorical question in this poem:

What is Love?

I believe there are stages or phases of love or romance. I have listed these below and have linked to poems that I have written to celebrate that aspect of love. (I haven't yet written a poem for all categories.) They are in a general order of how love progresses for some in the course of love's journey. (This is not accounting for maternal, paternal or filial love or love for one's fellow man.)


  • Waiting/yearning for love
This is the period of love when we long for love, see others in love and are envious, daydream about loving and being loved, cry in our loneliness. We look for the Beloved each day and write poems about love.


  • Love someone - unrequited
This time of love is when we find the Beloved and write poems about him or her. We pine for the one we have fallen for. We look for ways to meet or see or contact the Beloved. We love but it remains unrealized. We borderline stalk the Beloved. (Okay sometimes we stalk them!)

  • Loved by someone - unrequited
This is a time of romance when we are wooed by someone, are the Beloved of another. We are sought out and become objects of affection for another. We sense love, are touched by the heart of another but our own heart remains distant from the pursuer. We can even become giddy with love but, still, do not fall in love.

  • Beginning stages of romance
This is the time when the Lover and the Beloved fall in love. Teasing and flirting is welcome and encouraged. Sleep is often delayed or forgotten to steal time with the object of our heart's desire. Both are becoming intoxicated with love. Flaws and inconsistencies are overlooked.Love poems and letters fly freely and profusely.

  • Full blown romance
This is the time of love when sacrifices are made in many areas. Full love drunkenness ensues. Friends and family are neglected or forgotten. Lives are rearranged to be together. Future plans for a lifetime together are made. Poems of great intensity are fashioned with promises of eternal love.


  • Loving and being loved/mature romance
This time of love is marked by commitments: emotional, financial, and relational. Reading one another's thoughts becomes commonplace. Flaws become apparent and adjustments are made in the Lover and Beloved. Romance begins to take backseat to careers and families. Love is strong and deep but romance has waned somewhat. Where romance was once easy it, takes work at this point.



  • Rejected by someone you love
This period of love can take place before mature romance and often does. Interests in the Beloved have waned. The excitement and attraction has subsided. Tears and anger often replace smiles and joy. Jealousies, resentments, sadness ensues. Only letters of guilt and blame remain.

  • Rejecting someone you love
This period of love is described in the same way. It can take place before mature romance and often does. Interests in the have waned. The excitement and attraction has subsided. Tears and anger often replace smiles and joy. Jealousies, resentments, sadness ensues. Only letters of guilt and blame remain.

  • Broken-hearted
This time of romance results in anger, bitterness, sadness, rejection, grief. Seeing anyone in love or any hint of romance can bring on tears. Depression leaves the broken-hearted lover desire only solitude.

  • Hating the one who rejected you
In this period of love, hatred, anger and grief overcome the lover. Abandonment and rejection weigh the life down and blaming the other turns into a life of sourness.

  • Love, loss, and grief/death or separation
In this period of love, the lover may die or be lost in some way. Memories fill the heart, but pain of the loss is intense. Love poems and letters cannot be read. 


  • Remembering love - bittersweet 
During this time the love letters and poems are read and love remembered. Pain is still present, but the sourness has turned bittersweet. Anger and resentment has faded. 

  • Healed - ready to love and be loved again
This period marks a new openness to love again. Pain still remains from past hurts of love, but the willingness to love again is recaptured.


Listing the periods or stages of love was the result of reflecting on love during the days leading up to February 14th, St. Valentine's Day. I hope this reflection helps you in your journey of love.

© 2014 ajwrites57
A Long
❤ ❤ ❤


image: By Warner Bros. (DVD with the film and the trailer), via Wikimedia Commons
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