Last summer my mother stumbled upon an article during a particularly hard and confusing time for me, in hopes that it would help me clear my head and figure things out. This article written by Kate Rose from Elephant Journal explains a theory of how in our lifetimes we fall in love three different times, a concept at the time I did not understand.

How could you fall in love three different times? I thought there was one person you loved forever and that was it, but then diving deeper into this article and giving things a little more time to develop I began to understand.

Your first love is said to be when you’re younger, the love that everyone else told us was right, it probably doesn’t feel right but we shoved that feeling down because we told ourselves this is what love is. This is the love that looks right.

Your second love is the hard love. The one that teaches you lessons about yourself and reveals things to you that you never knew. This is the love that hurts, the love that cycles in hopes it’ll get better the next go around, the love that we tell ourselves that it’s not worth anything if we aren’t fighting for it just to convince ourselves we aren’t wasting our time.

This love that has its major highs and lows and you find yourself staying through those lows with the hopes of those highs. This love becomes such an up and down, we lose ourselves trying to make it work rather than taking a step back and realizing that maybe it never will. This is the love we wished was right.

Then the third love is the love that that comes from out of nowhere. The love that you never see coming. The love that changes your whole idea of love but then looking back you couldn’t think of love in any other way. This love you can’t explain the connection. You can’t explain how easy things come. You can’t explain the feelings that are running through your head but at the same time, it all makes sense.

This love is the love where everything just fits, you don’t have to try so hard anymore to be someone you’re not, the pressure to be perfect is gone because everything is already perfect. This isn’t the love that we thought we’d have, but it’s so much better.

This is the love that feels right, the one we know is right, the great love.

I never understood it - falling in love with three people was something of a foreign concept to me. How was that possible? All the storybooks and fairytales I read when I was younger said you fell in love with one person and that was it, that was your happy ever after. For the longest time, I couldn’t comprehend how on earth a person could give their heart to more than one person but really love one person forever. It wasn’t until I took a step back and really, really thought things over until it hit me.

Sometimes we need those first and second loves to make those last loves really worth it. Everyone in our lives is either a blessing or a lesson, and those lessons can just be applied so once we meet our blessing we can love without limits and leave it all out on the table. No one’s forced to leave the love that looks right or the love that we tell ourselves that if we don’t fight for it then it’s not worth anything, but there’s something special about that third love.

We can make the choice to believe that everything happens for a reason, we can make the choice to believe that it is possible to fall in love more than once, we can make a choice that everyone has that third love that will show them why the other two didn’t work out in the past before.