If you believe in soulmates, the answer could be a little more complicated. The concept of soulmates is defined as “a close friend or romantic partner with whom one has a unique deep connection based on mutual understanding and acceptance.” Love intensifies the human experience and — if we’re lucky — we get to experience it multiple times throughout our lives.
“the choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.”
All About Love – bell hooks
Romantic Love
Have you heard of the Three Loves Theory? It’s a theory that throughout our entire lives, we will fall in love three times. Each love is uniquely different from the other, but they all teach us a little more about ourselves, the way we love, and the way we want to be loved. The first love is the “first love”, the second is the “intense love”, and the third is the “unconditional love”.
- First Love
First there’s the first love. That’s the love that is like an all-consuming fairytale that we think will last forever. It’s the love that feels like true love from the start and you cannot possibly fathom it ever ending because how could it!
It’s more superficial and shallow than the other types of love, just because it’s your first love when everything is new and the relationship is entering uncharted territory for you.
When the end inevitably comes, it seems soul-crushing, and you think to yourself “how am I ever going to get through this?” But while it seems like your world is ending at that moment, you remain okay.
What do you learn?: You learn how beautiful and magical love can be and what a privilege it is to feel that blissful happiness for a period of time. But you also learn that sometimes relationships aren’t meant to last for a lifetime. You learn that a relationship can be great and the best for you at one point in your life, but it might not be the best fit for you at another stage in your life. And that’s okay!
- Intense Love
Next, there’s the intense love. You fall fast and you fall hard.
Roxie Nafousi describes this love as “The relationship becomes a mirror of our soul: we become aware of all our insecurities, needs and desires…the relationship is accompanied by dramatic ups and downs. We often try to make the other person our ideal partner and shape ourselves to become theirs,” and it turns our world upside down.
Everything that we thought we knew about ourselves wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it was not right in your new phase of life and love. It’s the intense love for a reason; the feelings of lust, passion, devotion, and attachment are a force to be reckoned with, and when this love ends there are no words to describe how painful the detachment is.
You feel as though you not only lost who you believed to be the love of your life, but as though you lost yourself, too. You learn what your capacity is to love and be loved in whatever intensity and depth.
What do you learn?: You learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible. Through the heartbreak from intense love you learn what you want from love and what you don’t. You grow and evolve in ways you hadn’t had to before. You’re stronger for it.
- Unconditional Love
Last, there’s unconditional love. This love occurs when you heal from the heartbreak and pick up the pieces of your heart after the intense love. By this point you think that you’ve already experienced all the romantic love the world has to offer and you’ve given up on the idea of a soulmate.
But another good name for this love is “unexpected love” because it comes when you least expect it. Generally this is the love that makes you feel at home, safe, comfortable, and the most “you”. You hide nothing from your partner and they hide nothing from you. With each other you offer the other the opportunity to be completely raw, vulnerable, and true.
This is not to say that this love is without its trials. But what makes this love different from the rest is that you and your partner will work through it together – as a team.
What do you learn?: You learn that love is very real and you are capable of it. You also learn that you are deserving of the love you receive. It is entirely possible to be in love with your best friend, your home, and your future.
Platonic Love
Romantic love is not the only type of love we can give and receive in our lifetimes. If we thought like that, what would the love given to and received from our friends, families, pets, hobbies, etc. be called?
I think another beautiful aspect of life is that our capacity to love is not only limited to romantic love with partners and spouses. That’s a beautiful part of life, don’t get me wrong! But it’s not the only way we love in our lives.
I believe that as humans we were put on this Earth with an enormous capacity to love. I’m not going to even begin to talk about the nature vs. nurture debate because that deserves a whole other article from me. But it is one of my core beliefs (and one that is backed up by science) that humans are born with a desire to connect with others and to form connections.
Our brains are ready to begin forming connections and relationships with others from the minute we are born. Summer Allen from Greater Good Magazine in the article “How Biology Prepares Us for Love and Connection” describes a study by Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki that used an fMRI machine to “measure brain activity in mothers viewing photos of their own child, another child they knew, their best friend, and other adult acquaintances,” and the results showed that the mothers reviewing a photo of their child elicited the same regions of the her reward system and other areas of the brain as reviewing a photo of her best friend.
All of this is to say that no matter the categorization of love and connection that our relationships fall into (romantic, parental, friendship, etc.) we as humans are biologically wired to love others.
Platonic love doesn’t just end with the people in your life. I think that platonic love can also extend to places, things, hobbies, and experiences in your life. I think a misconception that arises when it comes to the term platonic love is that it somehow “devalues” the love or almost dulls it.
But that’s simply not true. Just because there is not a sexual desire for someone — that does not mean there is any less genuine love than romantic love.
Self Love
I think that indulging in experiences, explorations, and hobbies that make you feel the most “you” is giving yourself the self-love that you need.
You deserve the love that you give others. You deserve to give it to yourself first and foremost because you are the most important person in your life. That might sound narcissistic and maybe even a little selfish, but self-love is not selfish. It never has been and it never will be.
Taking the time to understand and discover who you really are is crucial, especially at this time in our lives. Our late teens and early twenties are meant for us all to learn who we are independently and authentically.
Who are we when we’re alone? Who do we want to be five years from now? What do we really enjoy doing and learning about? These are all the important questions that this phase in our lives is designed to help us navigate.
In order to love someone else with your whole heart and being, you have to give yourself that love first. You can’t love wholly without being whole yourself.
I truly do think that we can have multiple loves in our lives. We can have romantic relationships, real platonic relationships, places and memories we cherish for the rest of our lives, and I believe that we can also be the love of our own life. Love shouldn’t be defined or shoved into boxes that are easily checked off — that’s not how life is, so why would love be that way?
As bell hooks said in the beginning, “the choice to love is a choice to connect — to find ourselves in the other.” Every piece of love in our lives leads us to finding ourselves.