Love Is Complicated

I had read an article a while back about how we only fall in love with three people throughout our entire lives. At first, I thought that it couldn't be true, but as I read on it made so much sense! Nothing had ever made so much sense in my life!

The first love is the idealistic love that happens when we're in high school. We see all of our friends with boyfriends. We see how sweet and cute they are together and we want that same thing so badly that we start to go crazy (well, I'm sure that not everyone would go crazy. Maybe quite a few boy crazy girls). It's become a social norm; society thinks that it's normal for teenagers to start dating in high school and some people might find it odd, outrageous even, that a teen hadn't dated at all throughout high school. That's what I thought when I was in high school. I was boy crazy and all I wanted was someone to spoil me and be sweet to me like all of my friend's boyfriends did with them. I wanted to date. I wanted to be with someone special on New Year's, my birthday, and Valentine's Day. I wanted to feel special to someone else besides my parents. But I was too naive to completely know what I wanted out of the relationship. I thought that I loved him and I wanted him to say it back, but I was reminded that we were too young to "throw that word around." I thought that he was "The One," but I was wrong. Looking back on that relationship, it probably was love, just not the love that I wanted to see in a life-long partner.

The second love is the hard one. We are learning what we want out of this love. There are a lot of ups and downs, pain and manipulation, going to hell and back with this kind of love. We try to change the other person or they try to change us. But we need to accept the other for who they are. It shouldn't matter what that person is like or how they show their love for you, but we have this image of what we want love to look like and we try to change everything to be like that image. My second love was like this. There was a very small gap in between my first relationship and my second. All I wanted was to feel special and I jumped straight to the next person who would do that. I imagined more of a future with him than with my previous relationship. But it wasn't a clear future. It was fuzzy and I tried everything in my power to get me closer to a clearer picture. But we were completely opposite. They say that opposites attract, and we did, but I wanted a successful and ambition filled future for myself. I am a very ambitious person and I need someone who can keep up with me. He wasn't self-motivated at all. I felt like I was always nagging him to accomplish something and be successful. He needed self-motivation himself, not me to motivate him. He was also a very manipulative person and it scared me how well he manipulated people. I soon realized how toxic of a relationship it was and I didn't need or want that in my life. I loved him but I had to get away as fast as possible. The article had also said that we may repeat the second love multiple times, hoping to finally get it right. But eventually, we grow up and get away from the toxicity of those relationships.

The third love is the unexpected love, we never see it coming. But this love makes sense. This is the one where we see the clearest picture of a future with them. We are more mature in this love and we accept each other for who they are. But we are scared. We have never experienced anything like this, but it is going to keep coming back to us until we take the risk. We never thought that we would be with the other person, but it just feels right to be with them. My current relationship is my third love and it completely blindsided me. I never thought that I would be with him but it feels so right to be with him. I met him when I was in my previous relationship and I fell for him. I later found out that he fell hard for me when we first met. It was roughly three years ago that we met and I don't regret becoming his friend first. We got to know each other on a friendship level, but now that we are together, I look forward to knowing him on a deeper, more intimate level. I look forward to going to family events together, meeting each other's extended family, spending every spare moment together, etc. There is so much that I look forward to with him and I can't wait. But we all have to remember to live in the moment, because, before we know it, 10 years will be gone in a blink of an eye.