By: Kate Rose
“Love is just a word until someone comes
along and gives it meaning.” ~ Unknown
It’s been said that we really only fall in
love with three people in our lifetime.
Yet, it’s also believed that we need each of
these loves for a different reason.
Often our first is when we are young, in high
school even. It’s the idealistic love—the one that seems like the fairytales we
read as children.
This is the love that appeals to what we
should be doing for society’s sake—and probably our families. We enter into it
with the belief that this will be our only love and it doesn’t matter if it
doesn’t feel quite right, or if we find ourselves having to swallow down our
personal truths to make it work because deep down we believe that this is what
love is supposed to be.
Because in this type of love, how others view
us is more important than how we actually feel.
It’s a love that looks right.
The second is supposed to be our hard
love—the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or
need to be loved. This is the kind of love that hurts, whether through lies,
pain or manipulation.
We think we are making different choices than
our first, but in reality we are still making choices out of the need to learn
lessons—but we hang on. Our second love can become a cycle, oftentimes one we
keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than
before. Yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before.
Sometimes it’s unhealthy, unbalanced or narcissistic even. There may be emotional, mental or even physical abuse or
manipulation—most likely there will be high levels of drama. This is exactly
what keeps us addicted to this storyline, because it’s the emotional
rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix,
we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.
With this kind of love, trying to make it
work becomes more important than whether it actually should.
It’s the love that we wished was right.
And the third is the love we never see
coming. The one that usually looks all wrong for us and that destroys any
lingering ideals we clung to about what love is supposed to be. This is the
love that comes so easy it doesn’t seem possible. It’s the kind where the
connection can’t be explained and knocks us off our feet because we never
planned for it.
This is the love where we come together with
someone and it just fits—there aren’t any ideal expectations about how each
person should be acting, nor is there pressure to become someone other than we
are.
We are just simply accepted for who we are
already—and it shakes to our core.
It isn’t what we envisioned our love would
look like, nor does it abide by the rules that we had hoped to play it safe by.
But still it shatters our preconceived notions and shows us that love doesn’t
have to be how we thought in order to be true.
This is the love that keeps knocking on our
door regardless of how long it takes us to answer.
It’s the love that just feels right.
Maybe we don’t all experience these loves in
this lifetime, but perhaps that’s just because we aren’t ready to. Maybe the
reality is we need to truly learn what love isn’t before we can grasp what it
is.
Possibly we need a whole lifetime to learn
each lesson, or maybe, if we’re lucky, it only takes a few years.
Perhaps it’s not about if we are ever ready
for love, but if love is ready for us.
And then there may be those people who fall
in love once and find it passionately lasts until their last breath. Those
faded and worn pictures of our grandparents who seemed just as in love as they
walked hand-in-hand at age 80 as they did in their wedding picture—the kind
that leaves us wondering if we really know how to love at all.
Someone once told me they are the lucky ones,
and perhaps they are.
But I kinda think that those who make it to
their third love are really the lucky ones.
They are the ones who are tired of having to
try and whose broken hearts lay beating in front of them wondering if there is
just something inherently wrong with how they love.
But there’s not; it’s just a matter of if
their partner loves in the same way they do or not.
Just because it has never worked out before
doesn’t mean that it won’t work out now.
What it really comes down to is if we are
limited by how we love, or instead love without limits. We can all choose to
stay with our first love, the one that looks good and will make everyone else
happy. We can choose to stay with our second under the belief that if we don’t
have to fight for it, then it’s not worth having—or we can make the choice to
believe in the third love.
The one that feels like home without any
rationale; the love that isn’t like a storm—but rather the quiet peace of the
night after.
And maybe there’s something special about our
first love, and something heartbreakingly unique about our second…but there’s
also just something pretty amazing about our third.
The one we never see coming.
The one that actually lasts.
The one that shows us why it never worked out
before.
And it’s that possibility that makes trying
again always worthwhile, because the truth is you never know when you’ll
stumble into love.
“You found parts of me I didn’t know existed
and in you I found a love I no longer believed was real.” ~ Unknown
