My aunt says people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
She explained it to me as, people come into our lives either to teach us something important, to play an important and specific role in our lives for a certain time, or to stay with us forever.
I’ve always liked that because it somehow makes it easier to understand the purpose for the different types of love we feel, at the different times in which we experience them. It lets us understand the reasons for which we might have allowed someone into our lives, regardless of how long or short they stayed. Not each and every person needs to be The One, to have been a loved one. An important one.
I adore the writing of Rupi Kaur as much as the next person, and to date I’ve only found one poem I didn’t fully agree with. She writes,
“you might not have been my first love
but you were the love that made
all other loves seem
irrelevant”
I don’t believe any love is irrelevant. I don’t believe any love is insignificant.
If there’s anything I know to be true about life, and about relationships, it’s that you can feel so many different types of love in one lifetime, and sometimes even simultaneously. Is it possible to love two people at once? Of course it is. Is it possible to love another human being without being in love with them? Of course. It happens all the time.
I’ve been lucky enough to have loved a few people in my short life so far, in different ways, and for different reasons. I’m sure many of us have even felt the butterflies of a new love fluttering while the deeply rooted remnants of an old love still flicker somewhere inside of us.
The wonderful thing about believing that people do come into your life for either a reason, a season, or a lifetime, is that you’ll never be able to feel like you wasted time, or energy, on somebody who wasn’t worthwhile. Because such a thing just doesn’t exist. With each relationship, no matter how big or small, painful or warm, you learn, you grow, you play, you change.
A partner asked me once, how and why I could still care so deeply for an ex of mine, when I was well into another relationship. And I told him it’s because when I love somebody, I love them forever.
It’s truly as simple as that. I’ve always been that way, and it’s just how I’m wired. We may not have chosen to pursue a life together, and maybe they’ll never think of me ever again. But regardless of how long I loved them for, I will love them for whatever part they played in my life, and for whatever fundamental way in which they changed me.
Many people seem to think that a heart shrinks and breaks and becomes weaker with each “failed” relationship. I think it grows. Kind of like how muscle mass is formed. I picture that with each strain, each breakage, those gaps are filled with new experiences and knowledge that gradually start to make the muscle bigger, fuller. Stronger.
If I’ve ever loved you, I probably still do. And I probably will, for the rest of my life.
I really think that people do come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, and that neither one of those is more or less important than the other.
I like this belief, because it means I’ll never really be able to regret a single person, or a single thing, in my entire life.
And hopefully no one will ever have to regret me.
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