Jay Shetty Reveals the 4 Stages of Love (Love Advice)

There are these 4 stages of learning to love, and I think— Learning to love. Yeah, learning to love. I think we often talk about you like someone and then you love someone, right? It's almost like you jump from like to love, and I think there's this step in between called learn, right? And it's a step no one wants to do because we're hoping that if you like someone, it just turns into love in a magical way.

And we're not taught, just like with learning. There are no classes on, you know, in our world, like how to learn back in school. But where were the classes on how to love?

Exactly, there were no classes. And so most of our notes on how to love come from movies, which haven't led us in the right way because there's a fairy tale romance. Sometimes they come from music, and most music— there's, you know, millions of songs written about love, but they're usually the pains that come with love. And so there are these 4 stages I found to the experience in learning to love. Step 1 was learning to love yourself. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that step 1 is going to find someone, getting on a dating app, hoping that you start messaging someone, get introduced to someone, but it's really learning to love yourself.

As a complete whole.

As a complete whole.

And not looking for somebody necessarily to—

Correct.

Like in the movies where they complete you.

Yeah, I think we live in a world—

They're your better half.

Exactly. All of that language of they complete me, I'm looking for my better half, I'm incomplete. There was also this language of how we've seen loneliness as a weakness. So when you grew up and no one came to your birthday party, you were unpopular. If you sat alone at the lunch table at school, you were the loner. If you went to a wedding and you didn't have a plus one, it was like, oh, like, you came alone? Like, coming alone and being lonely was always seen as a negative thing. And so I think we've built up this pattern of thought that if I don't have someone standing next to me and standing with me, Then there must be something wrong with me. And so learning to recognize that we are already complete is what prepares us to have love with someone else by practicing love with ourselves. And when you practice love with yourself, you recognize what you like about love, what kind of love you want, the standard of love that you want to be loved at, what you deserve. You set that standard.

Because it's hard to love somebody else Any more than we can love ourselves.

Yes.

Also, and I think part of self-love is again looking at that person in the mirror and accepting them, loving them through everything they've been through.

Yes.

And that makes them still be able to, to be able to be standing.

Yeah, when you go through the process of learning to love yourself, that's the same process you're gonna use for someone else.

Right.

So when you learn to love yourself, you go through all the unforgiveness, you go through all the misunderstanding with yourself, you go through all the connection and disconnection with yourself. And when you go through that entire process and you're like, oh, I can accept myself, you're now gonna have to repeat that for someone else, right? So doing it the other way around, it's a lot harder because you're doing both at the same time.

And you're teaching yourself as you love yourself, you're teaching other people how to love you.

Exactly.

And you're teaching yourself what is required, you know. And maybe we love ourselves so much that we teach other people, you know, how it's done.

Exactly. That's the hopes. That's step 1. Step 2 was learning how to love others. Right, you've learned to love yourself, now learn how to love others. This is a place where you get to practice love with someone else. And so there's this incredible study that I was reading from Harvard that talks about how when you first meet someone, you're experiencing that chemistry, that spark. And really what you're experiencing is passion and stress at the same time. We often don't know that, but the cortisol levels are increasing in the brain when you're feeling that attraction, that chemical spark with someone. So you're actually feeling passion and stress at the same time. We all know what that feels like. You get attracted to someone, someone gets attracted to you, sparks fly, there's, there's a chemistry. Now what happens is if that love lasts, the study says that things become more calm. I think we've also experienced that. The honeymoon phase is over, the chemistry's over, and what the study says is what happens is the passion's still there, but the stress drops in the brain. And that often makes us feel like there's no more excitement. That often makes us feel like there's no more positive energy. But what I find is that this is where love really starts to take off. Because now you've lost that initial lust, that initial attraction, that initial stress or tension that was there. And now you really get to practice love. What's beautiful is that the study says that the stress you first felt from the relationship, now the relationship helps you deal with the other stresses in your life. That's what a healthy loving relationship is, that in the beginning you felt passion and stress. Now the health of that relationship helps you deal with the other stresses in your life. The 3rd phase is actually really fascinating. Most people would think that the 3rd stage is love, like you got there.

Right.

Before the 4th stage, which is the final stage, there's a stage of learning to heal from love. And what I mean by that is that in the process of giving and receiving love, We all experience a lot of pain. You could love someone and not have love back. That causes you pain. You could love someone and overlove someone, and they try to love you back, but they can't reciprocate with your level of pain.

Hmm.

You could love someone and be loyal to someone, but they leave you, or they cheat on you, or they reject you in some way, and that leaves you with pain. Or you could have loved someone your whole life and they passed away. Something tragic happened. And now you're left with pain.

Right.

So in order to learn to love, we had to learn how to love through pain in some way, because so many people, when they go through pain or rejection, they close off. And that's very normal. It's valid that when you've had love that hasn't been responded to in a positive way, you become cold-hearted, you become hard-hearted, right? We hear those words all the time. And so the third stage was, now that you've become hard-hearted or cold-hearted, how do you soften again? How do you still go back to a place to be able to be loving again? And the 4th and final stage, which is, I think, one of the biggest challenges we have— just as we believe that we were incomplete if we were single and not worthy of love, the other extreme is we only believe one person is worthy of our love.

Hmm.

The idea that there is only one person that we're meant to love. And I don't mean that in monogamy or polygamy. I mean that in the sense of I can experience love with you right now if I want to. I can experience love with anyone in this room or anyone that I bump into every single day if that's what I choose to do. And that, that was the ultimate expression of love, that I was actually able to engage with each human with a sense of love, with a sense of connection. And how beautiful would the world be if we were able to do that? Thank you.