Falling in Love

What are the symptoms of being in love? For me, any type of emotion always comes from attachment (or care) to someone/something. The feelings of hatred, anger, love, betrayed, sad, happiness and enjoyment emerge through the way we associate our self to something. So moving on is not about shifting from one spectrum of being attached to another point on the same spectrum (i.e. from love to hate) but rather to shift from attachment to detachment, to initially care about someone to become indifference.

From this perspective, falling in love starts with a sense of attachment. You turn a stranger into someone you barely know, an acquaintance. At this stage, the other person's existence does not effect your life yet. Although if something good happen to them, you may get a slight happiness since you know the person. This one is followed by a friend stage where one's existence become very dear to you. At this stage, your life kind of being affected by the persons you are friends with. Although distance, frequency, work, family may influence the intensity you have with your friend. You will know the big events that happen in their life but your life is not fully rotated around their lives. The last stage is lover. At this stage, both of your lives kind of collapse to one another. You try to combine two different rotations to meet on particular time and place. You're in contact on daily basis and you want to know everything about the other person's activities. You get joy in knowing that somebody had finished their lunch or going to brush their teeth.

If you have symptoms of the last stage, then you are in love.