Throughout our life, we keep falling in love and breaking up — sometimes only to get together again. Some people enter our orbit, others go away, making us experience dramatic emotional ups and downs we didn’t even think possible.
But psychologists say that a person can only genuinely fall in love three times. And each such experience, in its own way, is important and even necessary. I have to say …. I’m still waiting to experience the third.
1. The Fairy Tale Love
Quite often, our first love arrives when we are still very young. It seems to us the kind of feeling which we’ve been reading about in fairy tales. So we idealize it and believe that it is for life. At this point, we tend to do things our peers or family members expect us to do. We refuse to pay attention to small problems and are prepared to sacrifice our principles for the sake of our relationship because, deep down, we believe that everything is as it should be. The way our relationship looks on the outside is more important to us than what we really feel. The way our relationship looks on the outside is more important to us than what we really feel.
2. The Complicated love
The second love of our life is the most complicated. Confident that we’ve learned our lesson from previous experiences, we take care to choose a completely different type of partner. Or so we think. We’re likely to be manipulated, lied to, or even hurt. We cling to any opportunity to patch up our relationship, but each new attempt turns into an even bigger failure. It’s a real drama with only occasional moments of happiness. Once again, our true feelings get sidetracked in favor of something else — in this case, endless attempts to save an ailing relationship. Such love teaches us that it is important to be loved in return.
3. The Mature Love
The third love appears in our life when we’ve already given up waiting. It comes uncalled for and doesn’t seem to comply with our idea of what true love should be. It doesn’t appear to be perfect. But it’s a genuine relationship, characterized by a feeling of extraordinary ease — something that cannot be explained with words. At this stage in life, we no longer have any expectations. We don’t waste time thinking up qualities that the love of our life must possess. So we’re finally prepared to accept our partner for what he or she really is. And, just as importantly, our partner perceives us in exactly the same way. Such love teaches us to be real and that a relationship doesn’t need to be perfect.
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