“All the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances, and one man in his life plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”
Man makes his entrance into the unreal world, perhaps from the only reality- His Mother’s Womb. Unlike other ages which have their phases of commencement and termination… The age of a lover marks it commencement the day it starts to develop in the womb and does not end even when the soul leaves the body making it a corpse to mourn for.
The age of a lover is a lifetime in itself. It has different meanings at different times and that is what makes the other six ages worth living for.
For an infant, it is for the mother that his heart beats. For the school boy it’s his possession for his newly bought crayons, his lately polished black shoes, and his well combed hair. Perhaps it is the time when he loves the first woman after his mother, his teacher. For the soldier it’s the love for his country, the motherland which gave it the space to dwell in this cruel and selfish world. For the justice, his love is the respect for his principles for what he considers morally correct and humane. In the sixth age, it’s the family man for whom love is family. The seventh age, the skinny and bent man for whom love is to relive the six ages in his dreams and through the eyes of his grandchildren.



But there is one age when love has a different meaning altogether. When love is all you need & all you understand. It’s when someone becomes so special that you don’t know where to stop. It’s when love is the blindfold which one wears by choice.
Love at this age is a sweet poison. A drug that at once makes you redefine what is right, what is good and what is acceptable. Later it makes you overcome all the boundaries and drags your foot into a place where you are the only law maker, and to be in love is the only law.
Fortunately or unfortunately this is the misery of only a few who claim to have found perhaps the one god made for them.
For the rest it is an experience that they keep on longing for...¬¬¬¬¬ experience of which they keep dreaming of…a fascination that keeps on getting stronger each time they see someone else lucky with love.
Not being loved is the worst feeling of all. The misery of humans is that they are selectively permeable to love and fully permeable to hatred. They do dislike the fact that some who doesn’t even mean anything to them hates them…but it is exactly the opposite when it comes to love. They want to be loved but not necessarily by the one who actually does…instead by someone whom they think they love. Someone who they probably don’t even know…but surely wish to know. Someone who might be a monster in disguise and possesses the ability to destroy their life in a minute’s time. But the blindfold of love doesn’t let them see this. The paradise of love is a fool’s island. Where things that are alike seem real and the ones which try to save us from entering the dreamland seem to be wrong.
Very often and indeed very aptly it is quoted “Do not love the one whom you love but the one who loves you”. But just like other few million quotes, even this is just good to hear, to read out at a gathering and then forget.
But out of everything that might be true or is claimed to be true…one truth of the age of a lover is that it teaches one to be strong, never to expect love for love, to see what isn’t actually ever visible. It simply it makes one ready for the unreal world from which his mother has protected him long enough.
The third age is indeed the most complicated and unpredictable yet the most beautiful, pun intended in an unexplainable manner.
No psychology, no philosophy has ever been able to delineate love…there is a possibility that in the near future we might be able to define infinity but there is no possibility that humans will ever be able to define love.
May be that’s the beauty of love, and the depth of the age of a lover.