The 3 Loves
Apparently we only fall in love with 3 people in our life time and each one of those are for a specific reason.
1st Love: Idealistic Love (seems like the fairy tales we read as kids)
If you’re like me, my first love was when I was in high school. Junior year to be exact. I had a boyfriend who I didn’t think that I would end up dating. His brother was good friends with my sister. I remember exactly how it happened…I saw him at a basketball game, texted him and then we continued to keep texting. Then we just kept hanging out. There was one particular text that I will never forget “I hope we last.” Over the course of our relationship, feelings started building to the point where the L word was dropped quite often.
The summer of going into my senior year changed a lot. I got dumped. My feelings apparently never left. I was what you’d call…devastated, all summer. I tried to keep my mind off him but it kept drifting to him. I tried a lot that summer and going into my senior year to get him back. We talked off and on just like we were friends. But I wanted more.
This is where things took a turn….We started hanging out more, not just as friends if you’re catching my drift. Only to find out that he was dating someone at the time. Uh oh, Erica…
His girlfriend at the time confronted me. Told her I had NO idea and I told her everything that had happen. Let’s just say, her and I are friends now!
Come my freshman year of college, we attended the same college, and I found myself falling back into the same trap as before. Good news, I got over it…all thanks to my college roommates. It was toxic to me emotionally and mentally. I thought I could get him back but that wasn’t the case whatsoever. I wanted him back. He just wanted other things…
I’ve never had beef with him and I wish him well (and from what I’m seeing through Facebook, he is doing well).
2nd Love: The Hard Love (teaches us lessons)
This love I met at UNI, through Tinder, I believe. Gosh, this seems so long ago.
So many memories are trickling back as I think about what I’m going to type…I almost don’t know where I begin with this one..
So, the second love is supposed to be our hard love, the one that teaches us lessons and the kind of love that hurts us. It often becomes a cycle that we keep repeating hoping that it will end differently than before. It can cause an emotional roller coaster of extreme highs and extreme lows.
Now, I have NO intention of talking bad about this second love.
He was the guy that I was excited to see all the time, walking into Mauker Union and seeing him with his group of friends, sitting with his friends and them accepting me, always saying hi to me, being invited to their parties and getting into the door because I was his girlfriend. I enjoyed his friends a lot and when we broke up, I missed his friends. They never acted awkward when I’d see them and they always said hi when I was out and about.
The breakup was a little hard for me. I remember it was FAC (Friday After Class) and his friends were having a house party. I noticed that he seemed a little off throughout the evening. He asked me if he could walk me back to my house (duplex with 2 other girls), as we approached the driveway things didn’t feel right. And that’s when it happened.
We stayed friends throughout college, I moved one and he moved on. But I was really hoping that thing would change and that we would get back together. We saw each other often out at the bars and on campus.
College graduation happened, I moved back home for a year or two, moved to Charles City for a job and lived on my own. We ended up talking again because he started a job and lived close by. Not going to lie, it felt nice starting to talk to him again. We always got along and we had a lot in common. That’s when we started dating again. We went to Iowa City for tailgating, went out to eat at a cute diner (halfway point between us) often, came and hung out with family, he came to my sister’s wedding and to my cousin’s wedding.
When I accepted my job in Des Moines, that’s when we ended up breaking up. Long distance relationships wasn’t in either of our favors and we both were heading in two different directions.
I wish I was more open about this relationship and my feelings throughout the second time we started dating. I did learn a lot in this relationship. What I wanted for my future, where I saw myself, who I was as a person, what was good for me, what was bad for me.
Let me remind you again, I have no intention of talking bad about my second love.
I still have him on Facebook, along with his mom, I keep up to date with his life and what he posts. He seems to be doing very well and in a great relationship. Fun fact: When Kane asked me to be his girlfriend at the Mercy Me concert, she was sitting behind me.
With this kind of love, we try to make it work multiple times. It’s the love we wished was right.
I am very happy for him and I wish him well. He seems happy and that’s GREAT! The relationship really opened up my eyes and I want to thank him for that. People come and go in our lives for a reason. Those reasons opened my eyes and my heart to my 3rd, my final and my best love I could have ever asked for.
3rd Love: The Love that Lasts (the one we never see coming)
I love that this love comes so easy that it doesn’t seem possible. It’s the kind of love that the connection can’t be explained and knocks us on our butt because we never planned for it.
Together, we fit, there’s no ideal expectations about how each person should be or how they should act. We accept each other for who we already are. Seeing each other at our worse and at our best. It teaches us that love doesn’t have to be the way that we thought in order for it to be true.
And we all know who that love is.
Kane.
When I moved to Des Moines, I got back on dating sites and dating apps and went on several dates. Obviously, none of them seem to have worked out. Just when I thought and told myself that I’m just going to give up on dating for right now and delete the dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, that’s when this love knocked on my door. (not literally)
Being introduced to Kane was the number 1 best decision of my entire life. I walked into the first date with no expectations, I wasn’t expecting a second date but I was HOPING for one, which I got!
Becoming friends with Kane first was such a great idea. I loved getting to know him, flirting with him like I was a school girl, making plans with him, getting to know his friends and his family really well, and taking our time together. The night he asked me to be his girlfriend changed so much for me. The feeling of never finding someone to spend the rest of my life with, vanished. I never had any doubts about Kane and I breaking up. Everything felt so right that sometimes it was like, “Is this too good to be true?”
I knew he was the right man for me from my dad. My dad had met a couple of my boyfriends and he would tell me if he didn’t have a great feeling about them. But with Kane, he told me how much Kane was right for me. Kane accepted my dad with the condition that he was in, they got along perfectly with football because they both were Dallas Cowboys fans. The only thing they disagreed on was baseball. Dad was a Cubs fan, Kane is a Cardinals fan. My dad knew and even though he passed away before Kane proposed to me, I know that my dad would have given Kane his blessing. 100%
How could I have gotten so lucky?! I prayed to God often about wanting a great man in my life. He put me through good and bad relationships and good and bad dates with men. He wanted me to go through storms, figure out what I NEEDED in a relationship and in a man, to find my true self and to love myself before placing Kane in my life.
He had Kane waiting for me and He had me waiting for Kane. God knew what he was doing and took care of us. I thank Bre for introducing me to Megan who introduced me to Kane. Those two have a heart of gold and I 100% know that the Lord laid that on their hearts.
Kane is my best friend, my faithful husband, my cheerleader, my supporter, the 2nd person I turn to for anything (God being the 1st), the one I say I love you to first thing in the morning and the last at night, the person I wake up to and the person I fall asleep to, the one that makes my heart skip a beat every single day, the one that puts butterflies in my stomach when I see him walk into a room, the one that I would do anything for, the one that I want to grow old with, the one that I vowed to spend the rest of my life with, the one that I want to bear children for and to continue to grow our future together with and my last and best love I’ve ever had.
Maybe there’s something special about our first love, something unique about our second and just something PRETTY INCREDIBLE about our third. The one that lasts, the one we never saw coming and the one that shows us why the others never worked out before.
