Are you here for a reason, a season or for a lifetime?

ANAIS Nin once said: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

A new friendship or relationship brings us a little something that was previously missing in our lives, whether we knew it or not.
Though nobody seems to know who first said it, we’ve all heard the saying: “people come into our lives for a reason, a season or lifetime”.
A lifetime is self-explanatory, a season usually just brings you some light entertainment from your day to day life and a reason can sometimes be hard to identify, especially if you didn’t know you needed it in the first place.
Recognising which of those three categories a person falls into isn’t always easy, especially when the lines that separate them are blurred. When we meet someone that we instantly connect with on some deep level, it gives us the feeling that we’ve known each other in a separate lifetime and it’s hard to imagine that connection ever ending.
As a result, the people that are closest to us feel as if they’re going to stay in our lives for a lifetime and when that doesn’t turn out to be the case we end up with a tremendous sense of loss, time wasted and often self-blame mixed in with confusion as to why it didn’t work.
There seems to be this popular misconception that true love is supposed to last forever and if for some reason it dies than it wasn’t really love in the first place.
In reality it’s often easier to love deeply for a reason, or a season, than it is to maintain the same affection for someone for a lifetime.
People change and often when they do they forget to tell each other. That’s when a relationship starts to go wrong and instead of focusing on all the good that’s come of that time together we tend to concentrate on the hurt we feel that it’s all gone belly up.
We forget that the person came into our lives at a time that we needed whatever it was that gave us that connection with them in the first place and that more often then not, that which was missing from our lives is no longer missing and the need for that person is no longer there.
That’s not to say that you should just move on and never look back, it just means that there is little need for regret because the good that has come from knowing each other remains long after the friendship/ love affair has died.
In some very rare cases, a person that comes into your life for a reason or a season stays, in some capacity, for a lifetime. The relationship that you started off with evolves into something different. The burning passionate love you felt for a partner turns into a platonic but deep and abiding love you feel for your closest of friends.
You might feel the loss of the relationship you shared but what replaces it is infinitely more precious and something you should fight with every ounce of your being to keep a hold of for a lifetime.