Your First Love Isn’t The One You Won’t Forget

FEB. 9, 2014 By BRIANNA WIEST

Someone recently made a comment to me in which they referred to someone as my first love, and I instinctively said “oh no, they weren’t my first love; that was so-and-so,” though as I said it, it felt like a half truth. I realized that I have referred to a few people as that, mostly because at different times, I had really believed they were each my first love. It dawned on me that maybe “first love” has little to do with the person you first fall in love with and much more to do with the first person you think you’ll never get over.

Maybe it’s what we perpetuate or maybe there’s a simple truth to it, but my guess is that it’s both: people struggle with the “first love” concept because it’s the first person you are convinced you will love more than anybody. But we shouldn’t celebrate our “first loves” as these unconquerable presences in our pasts and indefinitely in our futures, as the ones we won’t forget. They are not as remarkable as the ones who do come along and show us how someone else’s touch feels just as warm, and that though we were once convinced we’d be eternally emotionally attached to someone, even the strongest convictions pass with time. The people we really don’t forget are the ones who prove that love is not expendable. They are the ones who give us the ability to look back on how convinced we once were that we could never, ever love another person as much as we did by helping us realize that we can and we will, because we did and we do.

I think what we all figure out eventually is that love and attachment are two different beasts, and that though they somehow have little to do with one another in theory, in practice, they have everything to do with one another. When you are most convinced that you will not love another person again, it is usually because that person gives you something more than love to which you are holding on — a sense of self, purpose, certainty for the future, whatever. You hold onto what your life could be, something that they aren’t responsible for giving you, but it feels like they are.

But you eventually realize that love itself is not maniacally compelling. It does not field desperation. It does not blindside you or rip you apart. The things that rest between your person and love are the things that do. It’s so easy, when we’re taught that “happily ever after” will save us, to believe that. But eventually we learn that the happiest days are the ones that come after love comes, goes, lingers, waits, and forces you, one way or another, to confront yourself and fall into stability on your own terms. It’s then, and only then, that we realize how our “first loves” have so little to do with love, and so much to do with us.