Sometimes while we are young, even in high school, we have our first. It’s the idealistic kind of love—the kind that resembles the fairytales we used to read as kids.

This is the kind of love that makes us want to act in the best interests of society and, most likely, our family. We come into it with the conviction that this will be our one and only love, and we don’t care if it doesn’t feel quite right or if we have to swallow our own truths in order for it to work because, in our hearts, we know that this is how love is meant to be.

Because in this kind of love, how other people see us matters more than how we truly feel.

It’s a love that seems appropriate.

The second is supposed to be our “hard love,” the one that teaches us important lessons about who we are and how frequently we desire or require affection. It doesn’t matter if it does it through pain, falsehoods, or manipulation—this sort of love hurts.

Although we like to believe that the decisions we make now are different from the ones we made in the past, in truth, we are continuously making them in order to learn from our mistakes. Our second love might turn into a cycle that we frequently repeat because we believe this time the outcome will be different. However, no matter how hard we try, things always turn out worse.

Sometimes it’s harmful, out of balance, or even egotistical. There may be manipulation or emotional, mental, or even physical abuse; there will almost certainly be a lot of drama. This storyline’s emotional rollercoaster of intense highs and lows is exactly what keeps us hooked because, like an addict seeking a fix, we persevere through the lows in anticipation of the high.

This type of love makes striving to make things work more essential than whether they should or not.

It’s the kind of love we wanted was appropriate.

The third is the affection we don’t anticipate. The one who usually contradicts our preconceived notions of what love should be and who makes us feel completely wrong about ourselves. This is the kind of love that flows so naturally it seems unreal. It’s the kind that surprises us because we weren’t expecting it and the connection can’t be explained.

There are no ideal expectations about how each individual should behave or pressure to change into someone other than who we are. This is the kind of love when we meet someone and it just seems right.

It shakes us to the core that we are just accepted for who we already are.

Maybe not everyone has the opportunity to fall in love during their lifetime, but maybe that’s just because they aren’t ready. Perhaps the truth is that before we can understand what love is, we must first understand what it is not.

And then there may be those individuals who experience a single passionate love affair that lasts until their final breath. Those old, fading photos of our grandparents who looked just as in love walking hand in hand at 80 as they did in their wedding photo make us question whether we even know how to love.

It doesn’t necessarily indicate that something won’t work out now just because it hasn’t before.

What matters most is whether we can love without boundaries or whether our ability to do so is constrained. We all have the option of sticking with our first love, the one who pleases everyone and looks beautiful doing it. We can decide to believe in the third love, or we can decide to stick with our second because we think that if we don’t have to work for it, it’s not worth having.

And it’s that chance that justifies trying again whenever possible since, in reality, you never know when you’ll run across love.

You uncovered aspects of myself that I was unaware of, and I discovered a love I had lost faith in. Not known