Most of us spend our whole lives looking for the one big love of our lives. Love is one of those rare emotions that have the ability to bring you absolute joy and then two weeks later bring you absolute despair. It also has the ability to temporarily blind us of the things that can hurt us by making us so fixated on the idea of love. It's almost like standing outside watching a storm, it is absolutely captivating but all the same dangerous.

The first stages of falling or being in love are frequently referred to as the "honeymoon" phase, due to the fact that problems rarely surface during this time of elation and infatuation. The love is passionate, consuming and wholesome at this time, the big problems are overlooked and really never get addressed. The best way to portray this is to imagine a couple on the phone and saying "I love you, no I love you, no I love you." over and over until eventually someone caves and hangs up the phone.

Moving out of the honeymoon phase is difficult, you can no longer hide from all of the problems, and addressing them takes buckets and buckets of patience. You argue, bicker, and fight to be right, but at the end of the day you kiss and make up because your love is not something worth giving up. Your love is still passionate, but thankfully, a little less obnoxious and a little more considerate.

Weeks turn into months and then months turn into a year or two and you find yourself at one of two places — still just as elated and in love as you were the first time you told the other you loved them, or struggling to hold on to the love you can only catch glimpses of. If you find yourself at the first of these two places, congratulations, you have managed to hang on to your happiness. If you find yourself at the second of the two, the phrase "I love you" is no longer enough to make you forget why you were angry because that phrase is no longer tattooed across your heart.

At some point, the consuming nature of love no longer blinds us to the issues that are present, and we begin to realize that what we have is not enough to hang on to and that consequently, "I love you" is no longer enough. The blindness has faded away and we groggily come out of the haze to find that the love has faded and we are simply hanging on to something that is no longer there.

I hope that you never find yourself in that place, I hope that you find yourself happily in love for the rest of your life on your first try, but, most of us won't have it that way. Most of us will have to go through this to find what we want and what we deserve, and although it hurts like hell to go through, it is all the more worth it when we do find our "forever happy."