Mirrored Internity

My Three Loves

When you're young and in high school, it's like the songs say... it's not that you're dumb. It's just a level of naive and that's not anyone's fault but biology. But that's how it should be. Kids need to be kids. As a school counselor, I get very annoyed when I hear kids say that the adults in their lives tell them their life isn't that bad, or just wait until they grow up, or it's just young love. Kids are allowed to feel and they're allowed to feel deep. Does it always mean it is forever? No. Does it mean they won't learn the difference one day that maybe life wasn't that bad in high school? I do not know... But at that moment, whatever they're going through is all they know and it's okay to feel the feelings and for those feelings to feel intense.

Welcome to my story–I am sitting here at 31 years old divorced with two beautiful babies and I have recently discovered that I was meant to have three loves of my life in this lifetime. I read that once somewhere. That people are meant to have three loves. I did not believe it when I read it, but I do now. We are taught from a very young age that love is like a fairytale. There is usually a princess in need of saving and her prince charming does just that. We are told that we will get married and we will have the love of our lives. That was what I had hoped for in life. A love that would prevail above all else.

They say the first love is the young, high school love. A lot of times it looks like how we're taught love is supposed to be. Almost like that fairytale, I mentioned above... My high school love story was not a fairytale but I did have a first love. He was the one the stories would say broke my heart—the one I had to walk away from. We flirted on and off with the idea of liking each other a few times over the middle school years before we officially became a couple before junior year. We went from an awkward, nervous teenage couple riding on a Ferris wheel to becoming each other's everything. I do not remember much before him. It was the kind of relationship where we knew it was special, yet we could not figure out how to make it work. The timing of life just was not on our side.

My second love, the one they say is our hard love, is supposed to come with lessons about who we are and oftentimes comes with pain. For me, my second love followed the textbook to a tee. It was the kind of love that follows the life manuscript. Marriage. Kids. Buying a house. It was the kind of love that taught me more about myself. I begged to be important. I begged to matter. It was the gut-wrenching part of my story where I learned who I was and what I deserved. I learned to become self-sufficient. I learned to put my children and myself first. I learned that my mental health and happiness matters. It taught me that I cannot depend on anyone else for that. It taught me that it is okay to walk away for myself. As the part of my journey where my first two children were born, it is the part of my story that will always be around enough to continue to hold me steady.

My third love, the love they say you never see coming, came into my life when I least expected it. It was when I did not want to be loved or in love at the very least. The internet says it is the kind of love that cannot be explained and the type of love that keeps knocking on our door no matter how long it takes us to answer.

How did I get there?

That first love I had was more than just one human. I fell in love with having a best friend. I fell in love with having an additional family to be a part of. It was the love that taught me the importance of being comfortable with the people you choose to spend your time with. I was shown forgiveness and acceptance. I was provided a place to go when my own space was too much. It is why we always gravitated back to each other. Even though the person I thought I was in love with and I could not make it work, we tried. I can see why now. No matter the mistakes we made or the pain we caused each other, the comfort of each other and the familiarity meant more. Even to this day, his mom and dad will always be two of my favorite people who have been a part of my story. To a lot of the world, we looked like the hot mess express of teenagers who should have been done a long time before we were done. He was the "bad boy" and I was the "good girl." Or so we were to the world. But that's not true. He was a young soul trying to understand some of the shitty cards life can hand you and I was a girl who tried to be perfect for the world while ignoring all of my internal thoughts and feelings. We were fire and gasoline. I wanted to be his world. He wanted freedom. Why was I not enough? Why did nothing make him feel alive? The world was telling him he wasn't good enough. So was he? What made me better than him? Nothing. He loved me at my worst, but he did not love himself at his worst. I wanted myself to be enough to fill the voids until I realized I had nothing left to give. I was the one that eventually got away. Even throughout all the trials and tribulations our relationship brought, it did not end on bad terms. There was never ill will towards the other one. He was always my first love, but I see now it was not him. It was all he gave me. The sense of family that I fell in love with. Over the years, we remained cordial and always hoping for the best for the other. He has stayed in contact with my family and me with his. It took getting a degree in education and a master's in school counseling while working with students who were the age we were when we were in love to see the vicious cycle we operated in together. I have learned that it was not me personally. I can see now that his choices were not a result of me. They were not away to hurt me. They were all about him, and unfortunately, I was just collateral damage. I can see that I did not help or have any grasp on the reality of his life. At 31, I still cannot truly understand what that 17-year-old boy was going through. I can see now all the ways I thought I was helping him and I was not.