I had once written this post about how we all fall in love three times in our lifetime on Os.me. That idea was published in 2020 by Kate Rose in her book titled “You Only Fall in Love Three Times: The Secret Search for Our Twin Flame”. This book explored the three types of love and what they mean.
We will explore the concepts in that book later but before then, how many times do you think we fall in love in our lifetime? Is there a fixed number of times that we fall in love? How many people do we fall in love with? These are important questions I will try to provide concrete answers to in this post.
The Nature of Falling in Love
To understand the number of times we fall in love in our lifetime, it is proper to clarify what we mean when we say someone has fallen in love. Falling in love is a special emotional feeling that makes you physically and sexually attracted to someone.
For most of us, falling in love is a state of vulnerability when one feels emotionally enchanted by someone else. You want to be with the person, you want to see them always, you don’t want to hurt them in any way, and you might experience butterfly feelings in your belly.
Falling is a beautiful experience that is typically described by the electrifying experience it produces in the individual but love itself is more than just the feelings.
Here, you will see how many times we fall in love in our lifetime, and if you have already exhausted your count.
How many times do we fall in love in our lifetime?
Several theories have explained what falling in love is and how many times we fall in love in our lifetime. The most prominent of those theories is the “Three-time theory” which states that we fall in love three times in our lifetime, each for a specific reason.
Some have argued that we only truly fall in love once in our lifetime, and that we would always refer back to our first and only love even after we move on with another person.
While these theories have their own explanations, I will see how I can make them clear as much as I can, beginning with the three-time theory of how many times we fall in love in our lifetime.
The “Three-Time Theory”
For many centuries, philosophers and mystics have believed that we only fall in love three times in our lifetime, each for a specific purpose. This concept was also recently awakened by Kate Rose in her book, “You Only Fall in Love Three Times: The Secret Search for Our Twin Flame”.
According to Rose, love is a journey of self-discovery and every relationship we have in our lives teaches us something that we need to learn about ourselves and what will make us truly happy. She discussed the three times we all fall in love and their significance to our love life.
1. The Soulmate Love
The first love is the love that feels right. It is what is closest to the fairy tale love stories you may have read or heard of. It is the love that appeals to what society thinks about love and you might do stupid things for its sake.
The Soulmate Love introduces us to the dream of love but somehow what seemed like a “happily ever after” wasn’t meant to last forever. Because of that, the heartbreak that follows at the end usually hits so bad you wish never to love again.
2. The Karmic Love
This is the love that breaks us. We make conscious efforts to make it work and we fail to question if that is possible. In the end, this love fails leaving our hearts shattered once again.
This time, it was not about what society thinks or the general assumptions about love. You wanted to do things differently by compromising your standards and expectations, amongst others, just to make it work.
3. The Twin Flame
This is the love that lasts. The Twin Flame is the love that comes into our lives when we least expect it and it comes to stay. Love is not that hard and complicated. The Twin Flame is the truest of what love truly stands for, and it completely changes our lives and how we think about love.
The Specific Significance of the 3 Times We Fall in Love
Recall that Kate Rose related these three types of love experiences to the development of our ideology about love. Each love has a specific reason, lesson, or significance in our love life.
The first love teaches us that love is more than just feelings or societal expectations of what it should be. Acting merely based on feelings would make you sacrifice your personal beliefs and ideologies for something that is far from being realistic.
The second love teaches us a lesson about who we are and how we deeply need to be loved. It teaches us that love is not obtained by force or coercion. This love opens us up to the third love that lasts.
The second love may occur in cycles with the same or a different person when you try to work your way into their lives without considering the possibilities until you have truly learned the lesson that you don’t need to weary yourself trying to get loved.
The third love teaches us that we don’t need to be perfect to be loved. Even if this third love may not start off very remarkably, it gives us true freedom on how we should love and be loved. It makes us accept ourselves just as we are, and it is the love that keeps knocking regardless of how long it takes you to answer.
The One-Time Theory of Falling in Love
This theory supposes that we only fall in love once in our entire lifetime and that the rest are not exactly “falling in love”. This theory believes that we all have a soulmate, and even when things do not go on between us and our soulmate, we still have a place for them in our hearts.
This theory also believes that no matter what happens, the only person one can ever be permanently comfortable with is the one person we truly love and no one else. However, this theory is not as realistic as the theory of three-time love.
The commonest dating mistake people make in finding love
The three-time love theory also has its own shortcomings in that we may not fall in love only three absolute times in our entire lifetime. These three times can represent three phases of love with several love experiences in between.
The commonest dating mistake people make in their attempt to find love is looping through a cycle of dating the same type of wrong person for so long before letting themselves go to find the third type of love. This is what Kate Rose meant when she explained that, “When we don’t learn the necessary lessons we need to, we repeat specific phases until we are able to find our twin flame.”
You don’t necessarily have to fall in love three times before you find the perfect love that lasts. This is because you can learn about these stages from other people, books, and a blog like this, without having to experience all the harshness of romantic relationships.
While I generally consider experiencing the phases personally as a better way to learn about love, it is totally fine to learn your lessons in a milder way. The lessons you learn about love from the three stages of love prepare you for what love should be.
How long would it take to find the third love?
Finding the third type of love does not necessarily have to take a lifetime but it could take a long time for some people. That often depends on their openness to learn and break out of the cycle of remaining in one phase of love for so long.
What truly matters is how quickly you learn the lessons. If early enough, you arrive at the third love sooner. If later, it comes later too. The most important lesson is in realizing that you don’t need a perfect love and you don’t need to be perfect to find love. Love finds you anyway!
