Over 70 million people have read Kate Rose’s article “We Only Fall in Love with 3 People in Our Lifetime—Each One for a Specific Reason.” The relationship expert’s theory has resonated with many readers. And while it’s been restated by many authors, the core principles remain the same.
We have three main romantic loves in our lives, and each serves a different purpose when it comes to our personal growth.
Now, you might be thinking that a person only needs one love. Or maybe you subscribe to the theory that your first love is the most important.
Personal experience is key here, but it’s astounding how many people have commented that they found this 3-love theory to be true.
Falling In Love the 1st Time
According to Rose, the first of these loves is The Love that Looks Right. This is the person we typically fall in love with in our teen years, or perhaps in college. It’s the person who introduces us to what it’s like to be in love.
The first love is idealistic, even when it’s not a good fit. Since we’ve never been in love before, there’s often a lot of turmoil involved in this relationship since both partners are still trying to grow into who they are and decide what they want out of life.
According to Rose:
“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.”
Our Second Love
The second love is the Hard Love, the one that hurts.
Our first love teaches us just enough to think we know what we’re getting ourselves into, but for many people, it’s not enough to be happy. In some cases, it can even be destructive.
In Rose’s words:
“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.”
The divorce rate would indicate that plenty of people marry their second love only to find out the hard way that it’s not a good fit. Rose called is “the love we wished was right,” and many people stay in these destructive relationships longer than is healthy.
But that’s where the third love comes in, and it seems that people can find this love at just about any age, including well into their later adult live.
The Third Time’s the Charm
In many ways, the third love seems more like a metaphor for your true partner in life, whether they come third or 23rd in the line of romantic relationships.
The beauty of the third love is that it comes when we’re least ready for it – either when we’ve decided to stop actively looking for the perfect partner or in the form of someone we never thought we would fall in love with.
As Rose describes it, this 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…”
This is the love that lasts.
The 3-Love theory has resonated with people of all ages. In a YouTube video illustrating the concept (viewed by over 1 million people!), commenters confirmed that they had experienced exactly this.
A commenter going by 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!”
Even those who hadn’t yet found their third love seemed optimistic it would happen.
“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 2 stages of love and am currently ok with being single, especially since I’m working on improving myself for me.”
If you want to learn more about this theory to see just how much is resonates with you, scroll down for the viral YouTube video.
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