To all the versions of you I’ve loved before

I’m not the first person to ponder the concept that being in a relationship means falling in love with all the different versions of a person over the years. After all, Heidi Priebe said, “to love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.” And Dale Partridge wrote, “I fell in love with a 19-year-old rock climber, married a 20-year-old animal lover, started a family with a 24-year-old mother, then built a farm with a 25-year-old homemaker, and today I'm married to a 27-year-old woman of wisdom.”

It’s a beautiful thought and concept. I would also call it a luxury. A luxury to grow with someone and find yourself enamoured by one person time and time again.

Just shy of ten years ago, I fell in love with an 18-year-old boy who I had nothing in common with. He was an optimist, while every glass I saw was half empty. His pass times consisted of wheels and engines and the like, while I had my nose in a book or a pen in my hand. He was soft, not yet hardened by any trauma or hardships. I wanted to protect him from the cruelness of the world and hoped like hell that I wouldn’t become something he needed protecting from.

I then fell in love with a 19-year-old workaholic. Driven and focused and determined.

I fell in love with a 20-year-old independent, confident young man. He knew he didn’t know it all, but he was eager to learn, grow and prove himself. He was discovering what it was like to live on his own and provide for himself, and for another. He was easy-going in nature, always the calm to my storm.

I fell in love with a 21-year-old dog dad. And in turn, he fell in love with hiking and exploring nature. Our interests, while still slim, expanded just a bit more.

“People change, you know.” I had said somewhere between now and back then. “I’m scared. What if we grow apart?” I was voicing what had been keeping me up at night. What if I woke up one day and he drank his coffee black instead of with two creams and 1 sugar? What if a switch flipped and the kindness faded from his voice? What if he was no longer soft and tender with me? What if we went from two people with barely anything in common, to people that suddenly wanted to go in different directions?

And then those fears came to fruition. But not in the catastrophic way I had imagined they would.

I fell deeply in love with a 24-year-old willing to compromise—willing to put his life on hold so that I could change mine. He loved our hometown, I wanted out. He loved the life we were moulding for ourselves, I wanted to toss a bomb on it. And when we reached a point where we could have easily gone our separate ways, we chose to stay for one another. The concept of choosing to love someone was truly cemented. He stayed solid while I reinvented myself.

Then, I loved a 25-year-old that I didn’t see eye-to-eye with. We developed different opinions and priorities. Our differences were suddenly more than just having contrasting pass times and interests. We discovered who we would become when the world as we knew it was turned upside down (thanks to a global pandemic), and it was very different from who we had been previously. This version of us wouldn’t have been able to make a relationship work long-term. This was the year that “through good times and bad” was put to the test. Gone was the easy-going man I initially fell in love with, and in his place was an angry, bitter shell. I knew this wasn’t him, but would the man I knew come back to me?

How does one know when to stick it out and when to cut losses? I still don’t know the answer to that question. But I was born stubborn and defiant, or so my mother tells me, and I’ll be damned if I don’t fight like hell for someone that’s given me everything they have to give. Everything I love will have claw marks on it should it ever be ripped from me.

After that, I got to fall in love with a 27-year-old new business owner. This version of him knew hardships and turmoil, but he also discovered what he was capable of. Life had weathered him a bit, as it does to us all. But he was slowly coming back to himself. I got to watch as he found a love for life again, slowly but surely. He was healing from burnout and the trauma of having his world turned upside down. After waiting with bated breath, the person I knew came back into focus.

And now, I’m falling in love with a 28-year-old homeowner and renovator. He gets to see the fruits of all of his labour. We get to experience a dream we’ve shared for years. We’re pulling ourselves out of the trenches, out of a few years of darkness, together. He’s not who he was at 18, or even at 24, and yet somehow I can still look at him and see it all. Because he’s always been steady and sure. Funny and my favourite person to talk to. Driven and hard-working. We’ve changed, but the reasons I fell in love with him have remained at the forefront of who he is.

We always talk about how lucky we are that we grew together and not apart, but the term lucky doesn’t necessarily sit right with me. These past few years have proven to me how much loving someone—anyone—is truly a choice. Some may call it hard work, or dedication, or just being so madly in love that you couldn’t imagine a life without them, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But I don’t think we’re simply lucky.

I know we have more years of growth and changes ahead of us. I don’t know who we’ll be five, ten, or twenty years from now. But if the last ten years have shown me anything, it’s that I’m not spending life with just one person. I get the pleasure of loving all of his versions. And with that comes a permission to grow and evolve myself. He’s offered me the grace of standing by me while I’ve discovered who I am—who I want to be—and, without too much thought, I’ve done the same for him.

My fear was realizing one day that we had changed, that we were far away from who we had been. And that fear did come true. But change is often slow, not instantaneous. We changed and it wasn’t the end of the world. We grew and it was for the best. We’re different and now somehow stronger. We’ve somehow struck a balance between growing together and separately. What’s best for us as individuals has ultimately been what’s been best for us as a unit. I’ll forever be marveling at how absolutely amazing that journey has been—and how it continues to be.

“But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way.” —Heidi Priebe