First love may be good start to growth

Did your first love elicit every emotion you’d hoped for and dreamed about? Or was it a letdown, a distant memory you now realize was only a short-term crush?

We learn deep emotional connection over time, e.g. when a first kiss awakens us to possibility, and further attachment brings sexual awareness.

In fact, how a person reaches out to you physically can feel like a wild ride … or cause distrust and even fear.

The magazine Psychology Today studied the phenomenon of ‘first love’ back in 2020. Now, I’m asking current readers to consider whether the power of early passion strengthened their first love into a lasting attachment. Or was it only an uncertain introduction to romantic and sexual behaviour?

Therapists for the magazine also asked, “Was your best love the one that didn’t last?” Or are many of us just “longing for nostalgia?”

My own first love was a heartbreak. The first man who kissed me loved himself best.

But I felt over the moon from my first kiss with a man whom I met unexpectedly and dated for several years later when we were both separated.

We’ve been married for 26 years and he’s still my “first (true) love.”

This is what we learned about first love:

1. It may initially feel like ‘magic,’ but much more depends on reality. Example: What did that first kiss arouse in you? Was it a sexual interest only or was it desire to take the feeling deeper?

2. Did your date want to pursue sexual possibilities in that moment, or did they stand back, smile and hug you?

In its overview of this potential turning point, therapist contributors to the Psychology Today article acknowledged there are times in life when something, or someone we love who has served us well, no longer suits us.

It can be obvious that we’ve outgrown that once-comforting feeling and/or the other person involved. Somehow, often painfully, we must explain to a one-time partner that our ‘first love’ no longer works.

It’s partly because love seemingly involves our hearts.

However, Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds, two Harvard Medical School professors and couples’ therapists, decided to focus less on the heart and instead on the brain: how love evolves or collapses.

At the time of writing, Schwartz and Olds have been happily married for nearly 40 years. Said Schwartz, “There’s good reason to suspect that romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.”

Some 20 years prior, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love leaving some people breathless and euphoric in 147 of them.

In 2005, Fisher led a research team that published a groundbreaking study including the first functional MRI images of the brains of individuals in the throes of romantic love.

Her team analyzed brain scans of college students who viewed pictures of someone special to them, then compared the scans to ones taken when the students viewed pictures of acquaintances.

Photos of people they romantically loved caused the participants’ brains to become active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter.

But what happens when a romantic turn-on begins to turn off?

It becomes obvious that ‘first love’ no longer assures long and lasting love.

What’s needed is a reality check: two people feeling a strong attraction are not always in sync. One may be seeking a break from a tired past relationship, the other swooning from a hands-on passionate encounter.

We need to recognize that ‘first love’ doesn’t necessarily happen in everyday life. A turned-on couple must still divide the chores of picking up kids from school, competing for a job promotion, etc.

First love, then, may be a “starter” emotion, important to a couple’s efforts to build a brand-new relationship of truth and intention.

And that may be as good a love as any new couple can hope to achieve.

Also, “first love” calls for a lot of other “firsts.” So, let’s not forget them: Individuals must also love themselves.

That means maintaining self-care of your own person, your well-being, your extended family and their necessities. Also, staying “in touch” with close people, friends whom you care about and who reciprocate those feelings about you.

First love, then, with both heart and brain involved, may also be a starting point to self-growth, embracing and expanding to loving who you’re becoming, especially because you’re being loved in return.