Worth It: 6 Lessons You Learn From Falling In Love One Too Many Times

If you’ve thrown around the L-word so many times it just rolls off your tongue, there’s no doubt you’ve experienced both real and fake love in your life. And now, you can finally distinguish the difference between the two.

You’re not a bad person who carelessly tosses feelings around, but rather, you’re a hopeless romantic who has always been on the search for your soulmate. This search has been an ongoing journey, in which your heart and mind have been destroyed and put back together multiple times.

Through heartbreaks and falsifications of emotions, you’ve learned valuable lessons about love you will hold onto for dear life.

These are the things you've learned:

1. Saying “I love you” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in love.

In your first relationship, it may have been fun to say those three words, but you realized you were only saying it because you thought it was a requirement of relationships. You probably said those words a lot, which further proves you had no idea what you were doing.

Young and naïve, your profession of love was a lie to yourself and to the friends you bragged to. You can now chuckle at how clueless you were back then.

2. You can’t force yourself to love someone.

You were once a part of a relationship in which the other person confessed deep feelings for you. And you hadn't really given much thought to them beforehand.

But out of obligation and guilt, you reciprocated such feelings so often, you eventually started to believe it yourself. The problem with this was you knew you couldn’t give your partner what he or she could give you, yet you kept trying to convince yourself otherwise.

Once it became clear that you were hurting someone, you learned you shouldn’t pretend when it comes to love.

3. There’s a difference between love and infatuation.

When you finally felt like you were in an amazing relationship with someone, you experienced all these feelings of euphoria. You were so caught up in constantly thinking about this person, you misread your mind and thought you were in love.

These thoughts made you genuinely happy and excited, but that didn’t last very long. You realized a quick collection of deep emotions for someone for a short period of time doesn’t mean you’re in true love.

Infatuation can happen in the beginning of a lot of relationships, but if those feelings don’t continue, love just isn’t there.

4. Loneliness can be mistaken for love.

Whenever you found someone during a time of loneliness, your feelings for that person developed almost immediately. Whether the person helped you get through a rough time, or gave you company when you needed it the most, it was hard for you to tell if you actually loved this person or not.

During the relationship, it was difficult for you to decipher if he or she made you happy because he or she “fixed your problems,” or if the person brought you joy because your heart felt close to him or her.

When you look back at it now, you might still be confused about it, but you conclude you weren’t fully in love.

5. Intensely passionate love is actually the worst kind of love.

Once your most noteworthy relationship ended, you were probably the most heartbroken you had ever been. But over time, your vision was cleared, and you were able to see why it had to end.

You knew your most intense relationship contained real love, but you also knew it wasn’t healthy. You found out it’s not okay to be scared as hell to love someone. You saw the problems that came up when you didn’t think about yourself during the course of the relationship.

While you already knew it was okay to argue sometimes, you also learned constant fighting isn’t normal. You now know you never want to love someone that way ever again.

6. Finding love requires time and patience, but you know it will be attainable someday.

Despite your failures, you still have high hopes of finding a beautiful love one day. You feel empowered and knowledgeable because of your life experiences, and you can use these lessons in your future conquests.

Your years of being heartbroken and breaking hearts will pay off one day because you deserve to feel the kind of love you have always dreamed about. You know you’re not going to find a fairytale love, but you’ll find a realistic love.

And that's better than any rom-com or romance novel could ever describe.