In terms of personal development, everyone has three basic types of romantic loves: platonic, erosive, and passionate. However, a person may think they only need one love in their life. Perhaps you even believe that your first love will be the most meaningful one and that it will last. The importance of first-hand knowledge cannot be overstated. Still, the sheer number of people who believe in the 3-love hypothesis is mind-boggling.
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According to Rose, everybody’s first love will be the one that looks right. The prime time for meeting this type of individual and developing romantic feelings for one another is during your teens and college years. Your first love is the person who will teach you what it’s like to be in a committed relationship.
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Even if it’s not a good match, the first love is idealistic. Since you’ve never been in love before, when you get into your first relationship, there’s a lot of upheaval as both of you continue to discover yourself and what you want in life.
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Even though it may not seem exactly right, you may choose to ignore the red flags or indicators just to make it work. Rose states- “We enter into it with the belief that this will be our only love and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t feel quite right, or if we find ourselves having to swallow down our personal truths to make it work because deep down we believe that this is what love is supposed to be.”
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The second kind of love is called “Hard Love,” and this will be the one that hurts. Many people’s first love teaches them enough to think they know what they’re getting themselves into, but not enough to be content. It can even be harmful in some situations.
According to Rose- “We think we are making different choices than our first, but in reality we are still making choices out of the need to learn lessons—but we hang on. Our second love can become a cycle, oftentimes one we keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than before. Yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before.”
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The divorce rate suggests that many people marry a second time around only to learn the hard way that it’s not a good fit for both of them later in life. Rose referred to these relationships as “the love we wished was right,” and many people stay in them longer than they should.
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There’s a third kind of love, and people can find it at any age, even well into their later adult lives. This will be the one to last, provided both partners put in equal effort to understand and fully cooperate with each other.
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Third love may be a metaphor for your genuine love, whether they arrive third or 23rd in a long line of romantic relationships. This third love happens when you least expect it - either as a result of you giving up looking for a romantic partner or in the form of a person you never imagined you’d fall for.
As Rose puts it, this kind of love “usually looks all wrong for us and that destroys any lingering ideals we clung to about what love is supposed to be. This is the love where we come together with someone and it just fits—there aren’t any ideal expectations about how each person should be acting, nor is there pressure to become someone other than we are. We are just simply accepted for who we are already…”
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All ages have embraced the 3-Love philosophy. In addition, commenters who watched the YouTube video that illustrated the topic (which was viewed by over 1 million people!) also acknowledged that they had experienced the same thing in their lives.
A commenter with the name Claire B said, “This is a good description of our life journey in love. Innocent and naive first love, I met my first love when I was 16 we got married and were together for 22 years, but grew apart. My tough second love was in my 30s, it was intense but very irrational and emotional! he hurt me and cheated on me, but I learned a lot about myself worth. And now, in my 40s, I have found my third love, it is totally different! It’s comforting supportive, he’s my best friend and my biggest fan, we pick each other up when we’re down and have each other’s back. Most of all He feels like home!”
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Even those who have yet to find their third love are now optimistic that they will eventually find it. In the end, Rose said- “It’s so crazy to how this fits in perfectly with your life that you didn’t know you had. I’ve only gone thru the first two stages of love and am currently ok with being single, especially since I’m working on improving myself for me.”
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