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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 fairy tales 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“You found parts of me I didn’t know existed and in you I found a love I no longer
believed was real.” ~ Unknown