How many times do we fall in love? Or how many people do we fall in love with our entire life?
When asked this question, you’d want to sit back, get a pen and paper and start counting from scratch the number of times you have fallen in love with. For me, the same thing happened.
I had met several beautiful ladies I loved before but the first time I felt that I had really fallen in love was when I was in my first year at the university. She was light-skinned and beautiful, her smile lightened my heart, and her melodious voice rings a bell in my head when she sings. I loved this girl so deeply and I was glad she was making some attempt to reciprocate but it all ended in tears.
When the question, “how many times do we fall in love in our lifetime”, was asked on Quora, a user began by making a long list of the number of times he has loved people and things including pets. Another user said we only fall in love once in our entire life, that when we find that person, we love them forever. This is quite an interesting stand, you know.
For many centuries, philosophers and mystics have believed that we fall in love with only three people in our lifetime, each for a specific purpose. In line with this, I am going to give you the proof that we fall in love only three times in our lifetime. Stay with me.
How Many Times Do We Fall In Love In Our Lifetime
When you truly fall in love with someone, you will understand the true depths of love. Many times, we love very superficially and this may be due to our caution to avoid being vulnerable or due to some past experiences of love we may have had.
We fall in love three times in our lifetime, each for a specific purpose. The one thing we can learn from loving and being loved is that the hitches and breakups we experience only teach us to get better emotionally and otherwise. They teach us to know what true love actually is.
The first love you fall in is that love that makes us act stupidly. The second is the love that breaks us and the last is the love that supersedes all.
Many people in the world today no longer believe in love. Love is not seen as just anything that we can invent whenever we decide to. But these three stages of love I will talk about will make you know that you truly have only fallen in love with only three people in your entire life even though you might have been with more people in reality.
Falling In Love The First Time – The Love That Feels Right But Isn’t
This love happens at a young age, in my case, I was in high school but it can be earlier or later. At these times, you are just beginning to understand your feelings for the opposite. You link those feelings to physical, emotional or intellectual attributes about the person and you allow yourself to fall in love.
This is the idealistic love, the love that feels perfect just like the fairy tales and it is also the love that appeals to what your family and society expect. Everyone wants love partners to be like love birds who can’t stay an inch apart from each other, society expects that love should be about innocence, and trueness and not about exploiting the other. This is exactly the kind of love this first love tries to mimic.
If your first love reciprocates the feelings at that time, it feels like heaven on earth. Your expectations for the relationship heighten so much that you believe it undeniable that you are meant for each other forever. You struggle to make things work, even let go of some of your home-acquired values and principles about life. After all, this is what ideal love should be.
However, because love is more complicated than that, it ends up falling apart. This disruption may also occur because, at that time, both of you have not really fully understood the paths that life would take you. In a short time, even if everything goes as expected, life happens to take you in your own separate ways.
But after passing through one of the most excruciating separations or break-ups you’ve ever experienced, you learn never to fall in love again. When it breaks, you are often willing to go the extra mile to get back the love of your life but you end up turning into futile cycles. So what happens the next time you fall in love?
Falling In Love The Second Time – The Hard Love
For many people, it may be hard to recount the three times they fell in love. I had always thought that the girl I talked about in the preamble above was my second love but I now see it as my first. This was because, at some point, I was in another relationship that I thought would be my third and last, but things didn’t go as planned either.
As I mentioned earlier, the three love experiences may not represent three distinct people you have ever loved. They may represent three love phases that you have passed through.
For the second phase, it is ‘hard love’. In this phase, you try to apply some lessons you learned from your previous relationship. Because you think the failure of your first love relationship was a result of your mistakes and faults, you try to do things better and differently this time but that even makes things worse because it makes it unnatural and unreal.
Falling in love this time may not be that rosy, in fact, some people do not actually experience the intense feeling of love during the phase but you are committed to making this union work no matter what. This love teaches you some of your greatest lessons about love, life and emotional maturity.
Your first love experience laid a foundation, this one reinforced it. It teaches you about who you are, how you desire to be loved and the value of commitment in relationships. You may experience manipulations, lies, deceit, lack of affection, several breakups and makeups and finally, a final breakup that will give you an air of freedom. You do not regret it so much, nor do you blame yourself for being the problem, but rather you look forward to meeting someone who will love you just the way you want to be loved.
Falling In Love The Third Time – The Love That Last
After putting much effort to make the second time you fell in love be your last time ever, you realize that it was not worth killing yourself about. At this point, you just do your best and leave the rest for whom they belong. Indeed, you now know better that you don’t have to die finding true love.
As you go about your normal life, trying to get yourself and your future on a good path, this love shows out of the blues without prior warning. You don’t go looking for this love, it comes for you at the time you least expected it. Immediately, you feel the divine connection between the both of you, you are both each other’s specs and they come after you as much as you go after them – so mutual.
It may not always start off very interestingly. Sometimes, it may be with someone you have met or loved before but this time, it is just seamless. Even when you may not want to accept this person at first, they keep coming into you until you become open to love again and this love will grow to become stronger than anything you have ever experienced before.
This is what the other loves have been preparing you for – that you deserve to be happy with someone that makes you happy and who is happy being with you. When you finally find this love, it will be incomparable to every other, you will treat your partner as though only you two are meant for each other in the whole wide world.
You no longer have to hide your flaws and imperfections as they will accept you for who you are. From the moment you left the second love, even though you didn’t see falling in love again from a close distance, you always knew the next person you will meet will be the one to give you true inner joy, happiness and peace.
The first time you met him, you felt something in your heart. He looked like everything you need in a partner and just like other times, you kept thinking about him the rest of the day. As you get closer, you discover certain things that are not in your criteria for choosing a partner but this is the love that keeps knocking on your door regardless of how long it takes you to answer.
What if you have fallen in love more than three times already?
As I already mentioned, it doesn’t matter if you have already fallen in love with five people or more already. The fact is, you can view these three times you fall in love, according to this philosophy, as three distinct love phases you must pass through.
If you do not learn what the first stage has to teach after experiencing it, you might have to repeat another first stage of love with another partner until you learn the lessons from it. The ultimate lesson is that love is natural, and mutual and that it grows more and more each day.
Must the initial stages always fail?
If you are both divinely destined for each other, it is possible to complete two or the three phases of love with the same partner. The initial phases of love are bound to fail because at those times, you have never fully understood what love actually means. You only think love is idealistic, simple and straightforward. When you understand the true dimension of love, it is then that falling in love becomes something you are very confident about and that is what lasts.
Conclusion
Here in this article, I have presented factual proof to you that we fall in love only three times in our lifetime. Love is a beautiful thing and I don’t know which stage of love you currently are in, based on what you have read in this article but if you have any questions or concerns about this topic, please drop them in the comments below. Thank you.
