The Second Love: The Hard Love

The Three Great Loves

Part Two: The Hard Love

“There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve always loved the idea that we experience three great loves in our lifetime.

Whether it’s true for everyone, I don’t know.

What I do know is that it has been true for me.

The first love introduces you to what love feels like. The second love teaches you everything love should never be. And if you’re willing to survive it instead of allowing it to define you, the third love becomes the reward—not because you earned it, but because you’ve finally learned to recognize it.

⸻

Keith Allen: The One Who Tried to Take My Life

People often assume the hardest part of my story was surviving the night I was shot.

It wasn’t.

That night, surviving happened in an instant.

It was the “Living” after it all, that almost broke me.

When Keith Allen pulled the trigger, he didn’t just try to end my life.

He ended the good inside of me.

The woman I had been before that night never survived the shooting.

She died in that room with him that dark night.

In her place someone else appeared.

A somewhat broken version of her former self, someone she did not recognize survived that night.

Someone dying to understand her own suffering, her own pain. She was someone longing to heal.

But healing wasn’t a straight line. It is a smilpe thing. Nor is it something that just happens. It is a deep treacherous path.

Some days the path demanded absolute courage. Other days simply getting out of bed was enough.

I had to rebuild a life that had been stolen from me, one small piece at a time. I had to believe that what happened to me wasn’t the end of my story.

That was the hardest part—not surviving the shot, but surviving the trauma.

⸻

Charlie: The One Who Tried to Break Me

After surviving Keith, I thought I had already experienced the worst love could offer.

I was wrong.

Charlie didn’t try to kill my body. He tried to kill my spirit.

He entered my life with lies and left the same way

He was the lying felon who taught me that emotional abuse can leave wounds just as deep as the physical wounds.

His weapon of choice....was lies and manipulation.

That’s the funny thing about manipulation…it’s a quiet kind of destruction.

It makes you question your instincts. It convinces you to ignore the voice inside that knows something isn’t right. It chips away at your confidence until you no longer recognize yourself.

For a while with him, I confused inconsistency and pain with passion.

I confused chaos with chemistry.

I thought infidelity created healthy competition.

I stopped fighting to keep pieces of myself alive and started to let them die.

But true love will never require you to abandon yourself.

Sometimes it will make us feel like we are losing something or losing ourselves.

But I am hear to remind you that not everything you lose is an actual loss!

The luckiest ones among us get to walk away, we walk away changed, the important thing is that we get to walk away!

WHAT I HAD TO LEARN

People ask me how i can speak about these chapters of my life without bitterness. While it's true, I can talk about both relationships now without feeling the way I did when I was in them that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten, or that any of it became okay.

It means those experiences don’t take up as much room in my life anymore.

I learned how much I could survive, although I wish I hadn’t had to find out that way. I also learned that surviving something terrible doesn’t automatically teach you how to protect yourself from the next thing.

I had to learn to trust my own discomfort. To stop explaining away things that hurt me. To understand that an apology didn’t mean much if the behavior stayed the same.

And I had to stop treating how much I could endure as proof of how much I loved someone. Love should never be measure by how much pain you're willing to endure!

I don’t believe I needed to be shot or emotionally hurt to become the woman I am today. I would never call those experiences a gift. But they happened, and I had to decide how I was going to live with them.

I still had work to do.

GETTING BETTER

Therapy was part of that. So was being honest with myself about things I would have preferred to avoid.

Choosing peace sounds simple when you say it. Living that choice was harder. Sometimes it meant being alone. Sometimes it meant holding a boundary even when I felt guilty. Sometimes it meant admitting that I couldn’t make a relationship healthy by doing all the work myself.

I chose therapy over denial

Peace over chaos

and forgiveness over hatred

Forgiveness was personal, too. For me, it meant finding a way to move forward without spending so much of my life angry about what had already happened.

None of this happened quickly.

But over time, I started feeling more comfortable on my own. I liked the life I was rebuilding, and I became more careful about who I let into it. I wasn’t willing to give up my peace just to say I had someone.

THE LOVE THAT CAME NEXT

I used to think love had to feel intense to mean something. After so many ups and downs, that kind of relationship had become familiar.

The truth is.....The second love isn't meant to last

It's meant to transform you

It strips away the parts of yourself that accepted less than you deserve.

It teaches you that being alone is infinitely better than feeling alone lying beside some who claims to love you.

I could enjoy being with someone without spending so much time recovering from being with them.

That’s what made the difference.

Keith and Charlie are part of my story. I can’t change that. But there is so much more to my life than what happened with them.

There’s the work I did to get better. The boundaries I finally learned to keep. The life I still wanted, even when I wasn’t sure how to get there.

And there’s the love that came afterward.

THE THIRD AND FINAL LOVE