Love is not a singular experience but a journey—one that takes us through heartbreak, growth, and, ultimately, destiny.

Throughout a lifetime, we don’t just love once. We love three times, each serving a distinct purpose, shaping us in ways we never expected.

The First Love: Innocence and Discovery

Our first love usually arrives when we are young, naive, and untainted by the weight of experience. It is the love that feels all-consuming, the kind we believe will last forever.

We throw ourselves into it recklessly, convinced that love is simple, effortless, and eternal.

But life has other plans.

This love often fades, not because it wasn’t real, but because we outgrow it. It ends over trivial misunderstandings or the slow drift of time, leaving us to wonder later if it was ever truly love.

But the truth is—it was. It was love in its purest, most innocent form, the only kind we could understand at that stage.

What we fail to realize in the moment is that love has depths and layers we have yet to explore. And so, we move forward, unknowingly preparing ourselves for the next love—the one that changes us forever.

The Second Love: Pain and Transformation

This is the love that breaks us.

It arrives with passion, intensity, and the illusion of permanence. This is the love we fight for, which we believe we can’t live without. But this love does not nurture—it tests, torments, and tears us apart piece by piece. It is the love that introduces us to betrayal, manipulation, and the kind of heartbreak that leaves scars long after it’s gone.

It is the love that teaches us pain.

It forces us to confront our vulnerabilities to learn what love should never be. In this love, we experience the depths of heartbreak, the agony of unfulfilled promises, and the disillusionment of realizing that love, no matter how deep, cannot fix what is inherently broken.

But this is also the love that teaches us our worth.

Through the hurt, we learn resilience. We learn to set boundaries to recognise the red flags we once ignored. We know that love should never require the sacrifice of our happiness.

And though we walk away from this love with wounds, we also walk away stronger, wiser, and unwilling to settle for anything less than what we deserve.

Yet, despite this newfound wisdom, we become guarded. We build walls, convinced that love is more pain than joy, more risk than reward. We protect ourselves, believing that if we remain cautious enough, we will never have to endure such heartache again.

And then, when we least expect it, love finds us one final time.

The Third Love: The One That Feels Like Home

This love does not come with fireworks or grand entrances. It does not arrive with warning or expectation.

It simply finds us.

It comes softly, unexpectedly, slipping into our lives like a familiar melody we somehow already know the words to. It does not demand or test—it just is. It dismantles every wall we have built, not by force, but by its sheer presence. It makes us feel safe in ways we never thought possible.

With this love, there is no pretence, no effort to impress. It does not fit the mould of our past desires, yet it feels more right than anything ever has. We do not just see a person—we see a future. We see slow dances in the kitchen, laughter echoing in the spaces where silence used to live, and hands reaching for ours without hesitation.

This love makes sense of every heartbreak before it.

And so, for the first time, we stop questioning why past loves have failed. We stop wondering what could have been. Instead, we find gratitude—for every wrong turn, every painful lesson, every moment we thought we’d never recover from. Now, we understand that every love before this one prepared us for the love that was always meant to be.

And at night, as we close our eyes, we whisper silent prayers of thanks—not for what we’ve lost, but for what we have finally found.