The Love of Your Life

I have said ‘I love you’ three times. I have meant it twice. The first was merely a teenage first time fling, didn’t even last a year kind of love, which had more to do with me feeling like that’s what you are meant to say, rather than anything to do with how I actually felt.

The second was a bigger deal, still young, but very much certain that how I felt was real I said ‘I love you’ and continued to say it for seven years.  And I meant it, whole-heartedly, for the most. But with the final I love you’s said I was crushed and broken. I thought I would never find love again. And in a way I was right, I have never loved like that since.The truth is, I have loved more.

The third time I said it was a whole different ball game. And it felt weird that I could of felt so right about it the second time round, meant it so much and then find that this time, some how, for some reason it was greater and that subsequently the second ‘I love you’ now held less meaning.

Number two was heady to begin with, it was materialistic, it was socially flaunted and it was, looking back, unforgiving, unapologetic and selfish in its nature. It was a regimented routine in which we both felt trapped and just as it was always meant to the love dwindled, despite it being there big and bountiful in its own unaware juvenile way for a long time.

Number three holds no comparison to number two, because number three is everything. It’s mature and trusting, sacrificing and compromising. It listens and communicates. It is honest and not self-seeking, boastful or proud. It is passionate and supporting. It is a friend and a teacher. It honours and fulfils. It is a love that moves together; as one. It has no need for possessions or façade. It is complete raw attraction of both the body and the mind. It understands the broken and strives to fight and to fix. It wants all of the same things and some of its own too and that’s ok because it’s a love that allows the other to be utterly at ease and vulnerable, with the freedom that only this kind of love can grant. It is unconditional in a way that no other love can or ever will be.

They say there are all different kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice. And I couldn’t agree more. And it is so for the simple reason that we must know difference between the love of our life and the loves in our lifetime time; those who make up the chapters and the one who is the book.

Great love doesn’t make the others any less real. It just means that they were your journey on the way to a much greater high. Each love will come to be either a blessing or a lesson and you will be surprised at how easily it is to distinguish the two when the right one shows up.

I do however believe that there is love after the love of a lifetime, and that yes it will be different, but you will find a way to feel it again and in its own way it can be enough. But mostly I believe you only get one person with whom it is all consuming and for me it’s my number three.