Are you looking to take your relationship to a new level? Here are some of the stages of love for a man and a woman, which will teach you what it means to be in love.

We all want true and lasting love, whether we’re in our twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, or beyond. However, a lot of marriages fall apart and most people don’t know why.

They mistakenly believe they have chosen the wrong partner. After going through the grieving process, they start searching again. But after more than forty years as a marriage and family counselor, I’ve found that most people look for love in all the wrong places.

They do not understand that the third of the five stages of love is not the end, but the true beginning of achieving true, lasting love.

5 The stages of love in a relationship

Stage 1: Falling in love
Falling in love is nature’s trick to get humans to choose a mate so that our species can survive. It feels so amazing because we’re inundated with hormones like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen. Falling in love is also a great feeling because we show all our hopes and dreams to our beloved.

We imagine that they will fulfill our desires, give us all the things we didn’t get as children, and fulfill all the promises our past relationships failed to deliver. We are sure that we will be in love forever. And because we’re so fond of “love hormones,” we’re not aware of any of this.

When we’re in love, we ignore the naysayers like the damned George Bernard Shaw who warned:

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most maddened, most delusional, most fleeting passions, they must swear that they will remain in that excited, unnatural, and continually weary state till death do them part.

The second stage: becoming a couple
At this point, our love deepens and we come together as a couple. This is the time when we have children and raise them. If we move past the child-rearing stage, this is the time when the marital bond deepens and develops. It is a time of togetherness and joy. We learn what the other person likes and expand our individual lives to begin developing a “we-two” life.

During this stage, we experience fewer feelings of being “in love.” We feel more connected to our partners. We feel warm and kind. The sex may not be brutal, but it is deeply satisfying. We feel safe, cared for, cherished, and appreciated. We feel close and protected. We often think this is the ultimate level of love and expect it to last forever. We often overlook the third-stage shift.

Stage 3: disappointment
No one told us about the third stage in understanding love and marriage. The third stage is the stage when the first two marriages fell apart, and for far too many relationships, this is the beginning of the end.

This is a period when things start to feel bad. It can happen slowly or it can feel like the switch is flipped and everything is going wrong. The little things start to annoy us. We feel less loved and cared for. We feel trapped and want to escape.

We become more irritable and angry, or hurt and withdrawn. We may stay busy at work, or with family, but resentments run high. We wonder where the person we once loved has gone.

We long for the love we once had, but we don’t know where it has gone, or how to get it back. One of the other partners wants out, or sometimes people continue to “get together,” but without really feeling intimate.

Related: Why You’ll Regret Losing The Woman Who Waited For You To Grow Up

This is the time when we often get sick physically, mentally, and spiritually. In our marriage, Carlene and I started having problems with our hearts (heartache?) and we were diagnosed with atrial fibrillation.

I started having serious erection problems. To be honest, there were times when it was miserable and we both considered leaving the relationship.

But we didn’t give up, we kept moving forward. There is an adage, “When you’ve been through hell, don’t stop.” This seems to be true at this point in life.

The upside of the third stage is that the heat burns out many of our illusions about ourselves and our partners. We have a chance to become more loving and appreciative of the person we are with, not the expectations we place on them as our “perfect mates.”

Carlene and I have now been together for over thirty-five years. We’ve moved on to the next stages of love and feel blessed because we’ve learned the disappointment stage negotiation skills and can enjoy the later stages of love.

Stage 4: Creating true and lasting love
One of the gifts of facing unhappiness in Stage Three is that we can get to the bottom of what causes pain and conflict. Like most people, Carlene and I grew up in dysfunctional families.

My mother and father suffered from depression and my father attempted suicide when I was five years old. Carlin’s father was an angry and violent man. Her mother left him to protect herself and her daughter. We all have wounds and the wounds need to heal if we are to have a true, loving relationship.