“Being in love is the only transcendent experience” – Armistead Maupin
It has been said that you will have three great loves in your lifetime. For those that are still searching, don’t worry. Number 3 will come when you least expect it.
#1: The Love That Looks Right
Most people experience their first love in their adolescent years – some even in high school. It’s the idealistic love—the one that seems like it has been lifted from the pages of a childhood fairytale.
But, don’t be fooled. This love isn’t for us, it’s to meet societal expectations. We enter into it with the belief that even if it doesn’t feel quite right, we need to swallow personal truths to make it work because we’re supposed to be with this person forever.
#2: The Love We Wished Was Right
The second love is our hard love—the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or need to be loved. This love is based on the rollercoaster of passion – when it’s good it’s great, and when it’s bad, it’s awful.
Our second love can become a cycle, oftentimes one we keep repeating expecting a different ending.
Yet, each time we try, we add salt to the wound and it ends worse than before.
This love can be unhealthy, unbalanced, and even narcissistic. There may be emotional, mental or even physical abuse or manipulation—most likely there will be high levels of drama. This is exactly what keeps us addicted to this storyline because it’s the emotional rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix, we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.
With this kind of love, trying to make it work becomes more important than whether it actually should.
#3: The Love That Just Feels Right
Our third love blindsides us and destroys any lingering ideals we clung to about what love is supposed to be. This is the love that comes so easy it doesn’t seem possible. It’s the kind where the connection can’t be explained and knocks us off our feet because we never planned for it.
This is the love where we come together with someone and it just fits—there aren’t any ideal expectations about how each person should be acting, nor is there pressure to become someone other than we are.
We are just simply accepted for who we are already—and it shakes to our core. This is the love that keeps knocking on our door regardless of how long it takes us to answer.
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Source: https://www.elephantjournal.com