“Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time.”

I once read that we fall in love with three people in our lifetime, each for a different reason.

The first teaches us what love is.

The second teaches us what it isn’t.

And the third, supposedly, arrives after we’ve stopped trying so hard to figure out the difference.

I have no idea whether there is any science behind this.

But according to the theory, I’ve been in love thrice.

My first love began on a mission trip to Jamaica the summer before my senior year of high school.

Jordan was a close family friend of my godmother, who was bringing her confirmation class to Jamaica to do the Lord’s work. By some stroke of luck, I got to tag along at the last minute.

We clicked almost immediately.

I had never been on anything resembling a date. I had definitely never had anything resembling a boyfriend.

It was completely uncharted territory.

Maybe it was Jamaica. Maybe it was being somewhere new and far away, without cell service or much connection to the life waiting for me back home.

And there was plenty waiting for me.

My parents were preparing to send me to inpatient treatment for an eating disorder. By then, what I had tried so hard to hide had become impossible to ignore. I was a skin-and-bones version of myself, still insisting nothing was wrong.

Hellbent on suffering.

And then there was this boy.

Maybe that was part of why I loved him. He offered a brief escape from everything I was trying so desperately not to confront.

Or maybe the universe sent him to teach me something I desperately needed to know: good love does not come with terms and conditions.

There was, unfortunately, one fairly significant condition.

He had a girlfriend.

So we did our best to remain friends.

We were separated by five hours and state lines, which meant our relationship existed largely through Facebook Messenger and Skype. Most nights, one of us would call simply to say goodnight and we’d end up talking for hours.

I fell hard and fast.

He told me he was falling too.

I still remember the moment I decided I loved him.

We were on the phone discussing our plans for the weekend. I mentioned a party one of the guys in my class was throwing. Jordan became protective—maybe even a little jealous—and I finally asked him what the big deal was.

Who cares?

“I DO.”

Two words.

Apparently that was all it took.

Ten seconds later, I told him I loved him.

We were young.

Eventually, we grew apart, and he stayed with his extraordinarily patient girlfriend back home.

There was no great catastrophe. No villain. Just two people discovering that something can be real without being permanent.

Maybe that is what first love is for.

The second one was harder.

By then, I had moved out of my mom’s house, entered some version of young adulthood, and downloaded the dating apps.

I first noticed Julian at the gym, where I had developed a remarkably efficient dating strategy: see, swipe, match.

Organic introductions were apparently beneath us in 2018. You first had to locate each other safely behind a cellphone screen, match, and only then pretend you hadn’t already noticed one another twenty feet away.

My friends and coworkers rolled their eyes at the strategy.

It worked.

He was older. Tattoos. Verrry good shape. Tall, dark, handsome, with a stoic face that made me curious about who he was when he wasn’t lifting something heavy.

He had noticed me too.

Apparently, he thought it was cute that I braided my hair on the stair-stepper.

I thought I was multitasking.

One gym membership. Exercise and a pool of fit, local, single men.

Economical, really.

A few dates in, he told me he was recently divorced from the woman he’d spent six years with. They had a house, two dogs, a kid in the mix—the white-picket-fence version of adulthood I had never come close to experiencing.

I had never even been in a functional romantic relationship.

A month after our first date, we booked a spontaneous trip to Puerto Rico.

We did not ease into anything.

And maybe that should have told us something.

It wasn’t long before things became difficult.

We fought regularly. The highs were very high and the lows eventually became too expensive. We loved each other more deeply than I had known how to love anyone, but love did not make us particularly good for one another.

When we finally called it quits for good, we both walked away with heavy, broken hearts.

It was devastating and reminded me of that scene from Sex and the City when Carrie asks:

I had lost pieces of myself somewhere between the intensity and the uncertainty, and rebuilding them took longer than I expected.

Still, that relationship taught me more about love than the easy ones ever could.

Marriage and divorce. Family. Forgiveness. Codependency. Resilience. The strange distance that can exist between loving someone and knowing how to love them well.

Julian also gave me a great deal of patience I did not always earn.

For that, I remain grateful.

By the time I was finally ready to take a break from men, number three showed up.

And yes.

He went to the gym too.

I had actually noticed him there once before, although I thought nothing of it until much later.

The universe does enjoy a callback.

But he only half counts in my rule of thirds.

What we had was short-lived, badly timed and never really defined.

An almost.

After the turbulence of my previous relationship, almost felt remarkably good.

But whatever was going on between us felt like a kind of love I hadn’t experienced before.

A kind where he shows up at your workplace out of the blue just to say hey because he knows it’ll probably make your shift a little brighter.

A kind where he says sweet things like, “I don’t care if you smell like smoked meats and seafood because you’re coming from work. I just want to see you.”

A kind where, instead of running for the hills when you accidentally let your freak flag fly and mention the alleged ghosts living among you in your apartment, he arrives at your door with Amazon’s best sage candle.

There is romance, and then there is paranormal preparedness.

Everything with him felt easy.

I could be weird. Embarrassing. Entirely myself.

I felt accepted.

I felt safe.

And, unfortunately for my dignity, I felt stuuuupid giddy.

Then he told me he wasn’t over his ex.

It took me a little longer to realize I wasn’t over mine either.

Maybe that was the point of him.

Not to be the third and final love. Not to complete some theory I found on the internet.

Maybe he was simply proof that love did not always have to hurt in order to feel significant.

That ease was possible.

That safety could be attractive.

That I could care about someone without disappearing inside of them.

I don’t know if we really get three loves.

I’m not sure the people we love arrive with assigned lessons at all.

Instead, we give them meaning afterward because that’s what people do with the things that change us.

I have loved three people differently, and each complicated what I thought I knew about love. I learned that tenderness can find you before you know what to do with it, that loving someone deeply does not necessarily make you good for one another, and that ease can feel unfamiliar when you’ve spent too long mistaking chaos for chemistry.

Each left me with a different understanding of what love can ask of us, and what it shouldn’t.

So until the universe sends me timing, I remain an outlying data point.

Just a girl who has been in love thrice.