A LEVEL-2 inquiry
Will Anything Ever Be Like the First Love?
Of course, the first experience will never be forgotten. But why? And is it the best you’ll ever experience?
It is said that nothing can replace the first love experience. Nothing will ever be like the first time you had a new experience. Remember that first trip you took? The excitement of travelling. The company you had. The road. How alive you felt during the whole journey. And then, finally reaching the destination. The happiness. The laughter. The fun you had.
“The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense. ”- Robert Louis Stevenson
It might be a long time since then but doesn’t it feel as if it had happened just yesterday? Talking about the things that happened a long time ago but feels as if they had happened just yesterday-the first love. Do you remember the first time you fell in love?
Of course, you do. Who doesn’t? Even if it ended badly and we wish to forget it, we cannot. Nobody can. The question is why?
Why we can’t forget the first love?
The first experiences are unique. What makes them unique is that they are new in some ways and the brain doesn’t have any prior sensory conscious first-person perspective data about them.
Yes, Nothing will ever be like the first love experience. This is because when something happens for the first time, new neural connections emerge in our brains. These are brand new connections — a sort of first image or exposure on a film of a camera — similar to which nothing contextual exists in our mind.
That’s why the first experiences are so memorable. Every other memory fades away with time but the first time experience remains the same. No matter how much one tries, he or she cannot feel the same they did the first time. Nothing can ever replace the first experience. Nothing.
The first love
No relationship in your future can replace the euphoria of the first love — the first time you fall in love. Almost everyone tries to tell themselves that they are more in love in their second relationship and in the third and so on. They tell their friends and family how much happier they are than they used to be — especially when the first one ends badly or was toxic in some ways. It’s just a matter of time before they see and accepts the truth.
There is a reason why any of the subsequent relationships are never like the first one. Apart from new neural connections getting formed( because of the first experience), these neural patterns also self-organise in our brain to interact with that person. With time, the patterns grow more profound as they interact with the person’s peculiar habits and personality( however flawed it may be). These neural patterns remain in the brain even after the departure or death of the person we loved. The brain just loses the ability to effectively use these patterns — and so the feeling of a part of us being lost with the end of the relationship is quite literal.
Now a question pops up in the mind — Doesn’t these neural patterns self-organise themselves to interact with every person in our life? Of Course, they do. Every person is unique in their own way and so we develop unique patterns to interact with each one of them. But still, the first love is more rememberable than any other and also feels more intense than any subsequent love. The answer is in the word “fall” which I deliberately highlighted earlier.
What felt interminable the first time now passes with a quickness borne of familiarity. It makes me wonder if life seems to accelerate as we get older simply because our days and our experiences become routine. The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention.
–Hugh Howey
When we fall in love for the first time, it specifically is the free fall because it happens out of nowhere. We have no prior sensory first-person experience of it and thus, we are almost unaware of it until we truly are in love. The second and all the other times we fall in love, however, our brain becomes self-aware because this time it has contextual data to relate to. Due to this familiarity, there is a lack of excitement.
“When we are children, the whole year feels so long. Time seems to pass very slowly. But as we grow up, the whole year seems to pass by very swiftly. It feels as if time has accelerated. This is because we become so familiar with the daily routine that we hardly notice anything. It makes me wonder as well if life seems to accelerate as we get older simply because our days and our experiences become routine. Is there any way to slow the time?”
“The first time you do a thing is always exciting”- Agatha Christie
So, instead of a pure free fall, it is a sort of conscious fall the second time because we know we are about to fall in love and most of us usually force it to make it happen( because we desperately want to). This forcing removes all the pureness which comes only when things happen on their own out of nowhere. The second, third and all other times, we know what will happen and so we start applying our brains in the situation. Then, love doesn’t remain a thing that happens to us. It becomes something we do consciously.
“Some things in life happen on their own. They are not done, they happen and the things that are done can never be as pure as the things that happen”
Still, we try to portray our second and subsequent love as pure, real and more intense than their first one. This comparison with the first one is in itself proof that nothing will ever be like the first love. All these futile attempts are made either to fill the grand void which gets created after the first love ends or to hide the fact that we want something like the first love but somewhere deep down we know we can’t have it. The claim that any love after the first one is as intense or even more is nothing but a desperate attempt and a lie which we tell everyone to convince ourselves of something which deep down we ourselves don’t believe.
“The soul is reserved for the first love. The body for the rests”
Everyone wants to believe that the relationship they are currently in is the best so far. They find flaws in the previous ones just to convince themselves that the current one is better than the last (and most of the time the comparison is done with the first). When a person finds such flaws or says that something he or she at the moment has is better, all they want to do is relive something profound which they had experienced earlier.[1]
Moreover, deep down they know that something of profound meaning in itself has been lost forever and they don’t want to experience the pain of accepting that something that valuable is not in their life anymore.
Everyone wants to avoid that pain. Everyone learns with new similar experiences that nothing will be like the first time. The first image has been printed on the mind and any subsequent experience will only overlap that image and dilute its purity. Anyone who claims to be in more profound love again after the first one ends and claims that their current love is more deep-felt and real are lying to themselves. And they are lying to make their life worth living. Because everyone cannot live with the truth.
“There is always a sort of madness in the first love which gets replaced by maturity the second time”
The first one is untouched. It is unprecedented. It is real in a sense and that’s precisely the reason why it ends. But wait, wait, wait. What’s the end of any relationship has to do with the question this article puts up? It does. Bear with me for a while.
“In this world, Everything of value is fleeting”
So, will anything ever be like the first love experience?
As the proverb says, Everything of value is fleeting. The first love is really of some value and so its destiny is to reach an inevitable end. But the proverb doesn’t end there. It further says,
“It gets replaced by something of even greater value”
By this logic, the second one should be more profound than the first and the third more valuable than the second and so on and so forth. So, what is it? Is nothing like the first love ever found again or is the second and the third of greater value than the last? Old is gold or the new is always better?
“Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love”
-Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near
One thing is clear though. The first experience — the first kiss, the first trip or the first love will never be forgotten. But the real question is how does one define or mark something as the first?
Every new experience has something new and something old in it. How do you define the first trip? The first time you went out of the home? Or the first time you went out of the town? Or the first time you travelled on your own or the first trip with friends? The first road trip or the first long trip to the mountains?
Now do one thing. Go and read the first paragraph again. Clearly, when I said the first trip, you imagined a trip which you consider your first. Why do you consider it the first? Did you not travel anywhere before it? Most probably you did. But still, you consider that one travel experience as your first.
Now, let’s again enquire about the first love. When someone says ‘The first love’, we clearly remember one person with whom we consider our love as the first. Right? Now, answer this? Was it the first time you felt something for someone? Apparently not. Was it the first one-sided love or the first mutual one? Was it the longest one or was it the first obsession? Clearly, it was the first in many terms — may be the first kiss or the first act of being physical with someone and so on — but it was also not the first in many terms. Still, you and I, we both consider one of our love affairs so far as the first one.
The criteria of something being the first is very subjective. Consider any first experience. We tend to denote the most memorable one as the first one. Or vice versa, the most memorable one so far becomes our only unfaded memory and we label it as the first one.
Everyone has had some other experience before the first one. It might not be that profound, long or real but there is always something. Heck, we all had that one love with someone in which we fell in love with them over chat. But, we don’t remember it that well. Do we?
By this logic, the most memorable one itself takes place of the first one. The more vividly we remember some experience, the brain designate a special place for it in our memory as the first one. What does this mean? This means,
“The more we keep having new experiences, the more our mind keep replacing the firsts without us even knowing”
We have no memory of many experiences. The more we keep adding new experiences to our lives, the more our brain has to remember. Over time, the old experiences keep getting replaced by the best so far because our brain cannot remember every experience. Subsequently, the first also keeps getting replaced by the best, the most profound and intense we had until then.
Since most people usually have two or three love experiences in their lifetime, their memory of the first love usually remains the same their entire life. Some experiences — which are not so broad as the love or the trip — really happen only once in a lifetime, for example, the first kiss. This, however, is not true in the case of the trips and sunrise and other things which we experience so many times that the first keep changing with time and we have no idea about it. Even if we do, we just know that we do not remember our first experience of that thing anymore.
Final Takeaway:
Will anything ever be like the first experience? Though this question is very subjective, I will try to answer it in broad terms for the majority of people.
No, for most people, Nothing will ever be like the experience of the first love. The first love will never be forgotten. But if the second, third or any subsequent relationship is really better than the first(or the last one), their mind won’t compare it with anyone ever. Moreover, they won’t even remember accurately with whom their first love experience was.
And yes, for most people, the first trip is not the best they’ll ever experience. They’ll forget their first trip completely as they add the memory of more and more new trips.
As for me, I haven’t forgotten my first love either. Its memory is as fresh as the newly blossomed flower. I haven’t seen her in 6 years but I fondly remember her — Her hair, her laugh, her smile, her voice and a few peculiar habits that only we both knew about each other. It was my first love experience in many ways, but again, who can say that I remember this memory accurately?
And again, I don’t remember my first trip either. I remember a 2014 trip with my two best friends as the first one, but apparently( as I was told by one of those two friends) it wasn’t our first one together. But again, who can say that he remembers that memory accurately?
Footnote:
- I am not saying that the second relationship or any of the subsequent ones are never better than the first for anyone in the world. It certainly must be. But no comparative thought arises in their minds. Here, I am philosophically enquiring only about the ones who aggressively remember and compare current one with the previous relationships.
- Level-2 refers to Nietzsche's bridge analogy.
