It’s been believed that every one of us falls in love with only three people during our life on Earth. And it is also believed that every love is there for a specific reason, that’s why we need to experience all 3 types of love.
First Love – THE LOVE THAT LOOKS RIGHT
This is usually our high school love. It is a love that is naïve and idealistic. A love that looks very much like the fairytales that parents read to us when we were kids.
This love comes with the belief that it will be our first and only love in spite of not feeling quite right. We are confident that we’ll do whatever it takes to keep it and make it work because deep inside we believe that this is what real love truly is.
This is a kind of love where how other people view us is far more important than our feelings. And this is a love that looks right.
Second Love – THE HARD LOVE
The second love is the hard love. The one that teaches us the hardest lessons about ourselves, who we are at our core, and how we want to be treated and loved. This love is the one that hurts us and scars us deeply. It breaks our heart through manipulation, lies, and pain.
This love can trap us, and it can become a never-ending circle. We might hang on to the pain and misery because deep down we believe that if we give this love another chance, then the ending will be different. However, every time we try to heal the relationship and give it another go, we end up in a worse situation than the last time.
Sometimes, this love is abusive, unbalanced, toxic, even narcissistic. It may include physical, mental, or emotional manipulation and abuse with much drama involved. And sadly, that’s what keeps us addicted to it – the emotional roller coaster of thrilling highs and lows. Like junkies, we try everything to get another fix and we go through the lows while expecting the highs.
This is the kind of love that we wish was right.
Third Love – THE EVER-LASTING LOVE
This is the love we don’t see coming. The one that oftentimes looks all wrong for us because it destroys everything that we’ve believed to be true about love. This is the love that feels easy and effortless. The one when the connection between us and our partner is so strong that catches us off guard and shakes up our world.
This love is where two people meet and they just ‘click’. There is no pressure and jealousy. There is no expectation of how the other person should behave. They accept and love each other for who they are. No masks.
This love shakes us to the core because it is unlike everything we’ve experienced. It teaches us that love doesn’t need to be how we planned it to be in order to be real.
This is the love that feels right.
Perhaps, we don’t get to experience these kinds of loves during our lifetime and maybe that is because we are not ready to. And perhaps the truth is that we need to first learn what is not love in order to understand it.
Maybe someone will need a whole life to learn the lessons that come with these types of love, and maybe someone will be lucky to learn them in a few years. Or maybe it is not about whether we are ready for love or not, but whether love is ready for us.
And again, there are those people who only fall in love once and it lasts a lifetime. The picture of my grandparents comes to mind. I often think that those people are the luckiest ones.
But those people who make mistakes but still make it to the third love are the ultimate warriors and believers in love. Because regardless of the heartbreaks and pain they’ve endured, they haven’t given up.
