Until someone special comes to accord it meaning, love is only a word. We believe that there are only three people we fall in love with in life, and we do so with each of them for a specific reason. The first love is that we had in our teenage years during high school – the innocent, pure love in semblance to fairytales and love narratives. This kind of love meets the expectations of family. We fall into it with the belief that the love will be the first and last. Despite the time not feeling really right, we succumb to censure inner truths just to love, and we press on while compromising the characters, believing it is all part of love. Because when we love like this, people’s opinion about us is more important than our true feelings. This is the one love that looks right.
Then comes the second – tough love. This is the one that teaches us lessons concerning ourselves and what we look for in the name of love. This love hurts, is full of lies, pain and manipulations. We often think it’s a smarter choice. But choice is a necessary evil, though you may not be with the right person, if we are going to find out what we want from this kind of love. Second love can become a vicious circle that we repeat often due to our belief for a different ending. And, regardless, every time is worse than the previous. Nastiness, unhealthiness and frustration can set in, and there can be emotional abuse accompanied with robust chapters of relationship drama. Like opera, the action is actually what keeps us spellbound to the plot, and just like a junkie trying to get a fix – an emotional Ferris wheel of severe highs and devastating losses. We fight through the pain, hoping that the high would come. For this one, we always try to make things work, an action that becomes more vital than the reconsideration of whether they actually should. This is the love we wish was right.
On comes the third – the affection that catches us off-guard because we never see it coming. We don’t anticipate it because it seems wrong and opposed to our love ideals. This one comes by so easily, making it seem unreal at times. The kind of connection we feel during this kind of love is the one we cannot explain. Tumbling us head over heels and teaching just things we never knew of; this love proves to be dissimilar to the others because we never plan for it. This is the kind of love that makes us come across the right person. It clicks and bonds us, without any expectations of what is supposed to happen or the way in which the other person should act. There is no pressure to become someone whom we are not, because the person accepts us for who we are – the acceptance that shakes us to our bones. Maybe it isn’t what we thought our love would feel or look like, and it’s really possible against all the principles we love protectively by. But it still somehow brings down our preconceived notions and show us that real love doesn’t need to correlate with our envisage concept in order for it to be true. This love keeps door-knocking, makes us feel our best and brings about all the difference in life.
A lot of us are lucky to recognize or even meet all our loves in a lifetime. Maybe it’s because we’re not ready for them yet, maybe we need to learn all that love isn’t, so that we can then know what it actually is. Some of us need a few years to learn every lesson, to know that it isn’t always whether or not we are ready for love, but whether love is ready for us. Some of us are lucky enough to meet love number 3 first, and find lifetime passion with it. The love-filled photographs of 90-year-old-grandparents acting like teenagers questions what we really know about love.
If you mind to find that third true love, having gone through heartbreaks and pains, count yourself lucky. What is really important is whether we put our all in how we love and how much we do so. We can choose to stick to our first love p- the ones that is extroverted and wanting to please others. We can choose to remain with the second – live in pretense that if we don’t want to fight for it, it’s not worth having. Or, we could be all patient, waiting for the third, final, true, organic and everlasting love – the one that makes you feel at home with no reason, the turbulently stormy love that comes rather quiet at first.
And perhaps there is something special about our first love and something heartbreakingly peculiar abut the second. But, there’s as well just something amazingly different about the third love – the one that takes us by surprise, the ones that stands the test of time, the one that shows us why it never worked out before. And, that is the possibility that makes trying again always worth it, due to the fact that the truth is – you will never know the time you will stumble into love. Don’t for one moment think you are or will be ready for love. Love will be ready for you.
