Yes, you read that correctly. We really, truly, only get one great love.

You only get one Derek to your Meredith, one Jim to your Pam, and one Jackson to your April.

Everything else, before or after, is secondary. It's the love that hurts you. It's the love that makes you pray for better in the future because can love really hurt this bad? Then, you find your great love and you realize as you're slow dancing in a kitchen in the middle of the night that this is what you waited for. This love is why you had to hurt. You had to hurt to feel the joy of your great love as it makes you so happy that you're sure your heart is going to burst.

Everything else after is secondary. You compare every love after it to what you experienced before. If they don't meet the standard, you're wary. Your great love was great for a reason, after all.

I found my great love when I was a teenager. He appeared after a "love" that hurt me to my core, and made me think that nothing would be the same again. He swept me off my feet with the kitchen slow dances and the endless laughter.

I was in love before I even knew it. He was what I had prayed for.

So, you can understand my surprise and the skepticism about love when he left me.

I lost my great love.

Yes, I'm young and I'm bound to find more guys, more loves, and more kitchen slow dances. But nothing will be him. He, I decided, was my great love. Everyone that follows will be held to an impossibly high standard because, unless you can make me feel the way he made me feel, you are secondary.

He has found others. He has found his great love, and that woman is not me. Feeling so strongly about a person is something that we only experience once. I'm thankful that he found it. As much as it hurts my heart to see him smile, genuinely smile, at someone else in a way that he never looked at me, I am mature enough to know that love is a magical happening. I wasn't enough. In some ways, he wasn't enough for me either.

And that's OK.

I have found others. I have tried to force myself to feel love and to be willing to fall.

Nothing will compare to my great love.

You only get one.