Three Loves and Lessons Learned

It's no secret that most of my friends growing up were boys....

 I have only had two extremely close girlfriends in my life.... Carla and Suzie - one when I was younger and one as a young adult, - the rest were all guys. 

I'm not sure if I liked hanging out with the guys more than girls because I was a tomboy myself, or because most girls are just too much drama, and drama has always stressed me out! 

While I could name off a whole list of guys that I considered my friends over the years... there have been three guys who not only were my best friends at the time, but whom I also loved....

I came across the following article the other day and while it may not be true for everyone, it is definitely true for me.....

It’s been said that we really only fall in love with three people in our lifetime. Often our first love (his name was Joshua and I really thought we'd be together forever!) is when we are young. It’s the idealistic love—the one that seems like the fairy tales we read as children. We enter into this love 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, even though many times, you really don't know what love is yet. 

The second (my 1st husband, Jim) is 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. 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 roller coaster 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 (my loving hubby, Stephen) 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. - 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 —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.

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.

I have been asked if I would do things differently if I could change my past.... my reply has always been and still is "No!" My past has made me who I am today. I wouldn't change a thing. I have no regrets. I'll always care for my first two loves, but my third love- he has my heart and is my world!

Thank you Stephen for being my love..... I wasn't looking for you, but I'm so blessed that you are mine! 

"You found parts of me I didn't know existed and in you I found a love I no longer believed was real." - Unknown

*Please note: The article was originally written by author Kate Rose and was published by: elephant journal. I have edited parts of the article. You can read the full article here.