In our lifetime, it is said that we fall in love with three distinct people, each serving a unique purpose in our journey of love and self-discovery.
The first love often comes when we are young, in the exuberance of high school days. It’s the idealistic love that mirrors fairytales we read as children. This love is driven by societal expectations and family influences.
We embrace it with the belief that it will be our only love, even if it feels somewhat forced or doesn’t align with our true selves. In this love, appearances matter more than genuine emotions, and we prioritize how others perceive us over our inner feelings. It’s a love that looks right on the surface.
The second love is the one that teaches us profound lessons about ourselves and the way we desire to be loved. It’s a love that can hurt through lies, manipulation, or pain. Despite thinking that we are making different choices than before, we often repeat similar patterns because we need to learn those lessons.
This love can become an unhealthy cycle, causing emotional turmoil and drama, yet we hold onto it hoping for a different outcome. We become addicted to the extreme highs and lows, hoping that enduring the lows will lead to eventual highs. We desperately wish this love could be right for us.
And then, there’s the third love—the unexpected one that defies our preconceived notions of what love should be. It may not seem like the right fit, but it comes effortlessly, like a force of nature. This love takes us by surprise, knocking us off our feet, as we never planned for it.
There’s an unexplainable connection, and we accept each other just as we are, without any pressure to change or conform. It’s a love that feels authentic to our core, defying conventional expectations.
Not everyone may experience all three loves in one lifetime, and that’s okay. Perhaps it’s because we need to understand what love is not before we can truly grasp what it is. Some people may find love once and carry it passionately until their final breath, like those timeless pictures of grandparents who remained deeply in love throughout their lives. Love can surprise us, and just because it hasn’t worked out before doesn’t mean it won’t work out now.
Ultimately, it comes down to the choice we make in love. We can settle for the first love that fits the mold and pleases everyone else. We can cling to the second love, believing that fighting for it validates its worth. Or we can choose to embrace the possibility of the third love—the one that feels right without any need for struggle or compromise. It’s this potential for the third love that makes trying again in love always worthwhile, because love has a way of unexpectedly crossing our path when we least expect it.
