“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
