Step two to falling in love a second time is, not just implementing, but growing from whatever lessons you learned the first time. It’s a process that you understand as you go – which is both the hardest part of falling in love a second time and the most gratifying. The self-recognition alone might be one of the most stimulating aspects to keep moving forward with them, just to see how much you’re capable of discovering about yourself and how to be fairly accountable for someone else’s emotions, knowing what a hurt like breaking up feels like now.

So there’s familiar things that’ll ease the nerves so acute that previously prevented you from ever getting coherent words out. Your stomach will do somersaults and you'll have sweaty palms when you contemplate the what-if "I put my arm around them” and almost every time you’re thinking of what it’s like to kiss them.

It’s the unfamiliar that tears down all the conceptions you thought you had set straight about love and functioning as an individual in a relationship. The (frankly) inane things you find you telling yourself:

“Why does this one hog the covers but not the bed at night?”

“Wait they like cats? I thought I had to hate cats.”

“No stop, you can’t be ticklish there. I’ve only ever known ticklish over here.”

And realizing you have the capacity to love these different people, who have different aspirations and backgrounds and, oh my god, trying to truly find your way around a new body, figuring out how to make love again because you’ve been detaching your emotions from sex for so long that, now, you finally ache to physically love this person to the same extent you feel for them emotionally.

You haven’t forgotten the words and still hold the worst memories too close to your heart for comfort, constantly reminded of what people are capable of, what the result can be when you give yourself to someone else. You keep it all going into a second love. The emotional investment still there, you might find yourself telling them to be honest with you if at any point they’re just not feeling it anymore because you’re just not interested in getting that hurt ever again. Because the first time it happened might’ve nearly ruined you, tarnished your idea of love – not to say it was only negative for you, after all there’s two sides to every story – but all this comes with the fear that it could end badly. Again.

That’s what makes it better the second time. You now also have hindsight, what behavior and actions work overall and which don’t in a relationship, regardless of who with – which in turn is exactly what makes it even more thrilling than the first. You know how you work in a relationship, your weaknesses and imperfections and the corresponding, subsequent arguments you can now avoid.

There’s something more adult about a second love. Hell if I know what adult love actually looks like, but it feels a lot like setting alarms for their afternoon post-work naps and making full weekend-breakfasts for them when you have never cared enough to pour yourself a bowl of cheerios. It feels a lot like letting them have that extra beer because you know they shouldn’t but realize they need, if but for a night, to forget (you know firsthand what it’s like have gotten stopped from doing that). Feels like ordering fries for dinner three nights a week because they’re cheap and good and you're both really trying to budget and they love drowning them in ketchup anyways. It hurts a lot like walking four miles after standing on your feet for the worst twelve hour shift of your life because you know they get anxious if they don’t get an endorphin boost.

It feels like wanting to really make something of yourself, be a better person, conquer every animosity you’ve ever faced – more than that, it feels like they deserve the world and it feels like wanting to wash away the bitter taste that past relationships left in their mouth, so you’ll give them everything within your born potential (you’re more than happy to work your ass off to do that) just so they’re secure and happy. Let me tell you that it feels like sitting on a train with their head on your shoulder, carrying their groceries, taking in a new and unknown domesticity and something that very well looks like what you imagined the rest of your life to be. It feels like the middle of the afternoon and something they do is so quotidian that you find you having to pinch yourself. Because how did you honestly get this lucky, not only a second time, but a deeper and more mature and enthralling time.

So the second time you fall in love is heavily grounded in reality. You’re grossly aware of what you’re risking this time. You’ve been to hell and back, you’ve experienced debilitating heartache, you scarred over and you taught your feet to walk once more. It’s why a second love doesn’t move you, but shifts everything around you that thought you knew and teaches you what it’s like to hold a vast spectrum of emotion for someone else without losing yourself to being overwhelmed in the process.