First Love? True Love?
Love exists in multitudes. It comes in different shapes and dynamics. It comes in pieces and in learning. It comes in growth and in change. It exists in strangers and in soul mates. Love does not exist as a single, expendable truth or experience. Yet, we are so quick to attach the notion of our “first love” to the first person we are convinced we will love more than anybody else. We tell ourselves that whatever we have, whatever that is happening with this specific someone in this particular relationship, will never be experienced ever again with anyone else. This includes our commitment, attraction or the intimate interrelation with this special person. Due to the possibility of our love getting wasted or eroded over time, this fear that we’re well acquainted with somehow justifies our need to love fiercer than we usually would. When we feel that we are assuredly invested in this relationship, it is then worthy as our “first love”. But I question, is this our true “first love”?
Perhaps we may want to consider the idea that ‘first love’ has less to do with the person we first fall in love with, but more to do with the first person we never quite got over.
In my humble opinion, I feel that our ‘first loves’ aren’t the unconquerable presences in our pasts and indefinitely in our futures, but it is simply the ones we can’t forget. These people are the ones that show us how someone else’s touch can feel just as warm or even warmer, and though we were once convinced we’d be eternally emotionally attached to someone, even the strongest conviction pass with time. The people we really don’t forget, or what I claim to be our ‘true love’, be it first, second or third, are the ones who prove and show that love is not expendable. They are the ones who present us the capacity to look back on how convinced we once were that we could never, ever love another person as much as we did by guiding us to realise that we can and we will, because we did and we do.
Who is this person you may have ended up in separation with, but you still see in many ways — sometimes in people, and sometimes in places?
Now, don’t be surprised if there is more than one person in mind. Yes, we all talk about the importance of a first love. But I’ve always found second love, or even other loves to come, to be as equally important, if not more so. The second love validates the first sensations you experienced were actually love. A second love is more cautious, and this time you know more about yourself, so you are more readily aware of what you’re getting yourself into.
A second love proves to you that you can love again, that all those amazing, heartbreaking, breathtaking experiences you thought were over, can indeed happen again.
A second love is falling in love with love, once more. However, we need to keep in mind that we are all different. We show love in a different manner, and we receive in a different manner too. This leads to some relationships being long, steady and easy, and others being quick, enlightening and challenging. Some brush along our surfaces, and others dive beneath and uproot us. Some might be temporary, and one might last “forever”. This doesn’t mean it has to be the only one there is. It doesn’t mean there is not something to be experienced, to be understood, to be learned, from whatever came before.
We also need to accept the fact that love may not be all that matters.
Love itself may not be enough, especially when it is put to practice between fundamentally flawed and unfinished beings. Sometimes our love isn’t greater than whatever is doled out beside it. Love doesn’t always win, and frankly, sometimes it shouldn’t. We can’t make a relationship something more than what it inherently is. We can’t make ourselves fit into something we inherently won’t. Sometimes we try too hard and get caught up in being too romantic of the idea that we love someone so much that we’ll give up our lives for them, and that is when love will ruin us. Dying is a quick slip into oblivion, and there is nothing really romantic about that. I hope one day, you’d meet your true love who loves you in the right way, and comes up to you with these words to say: Why fall for someone you’ll die for, when you can fall for someone you’ll live for?
