3 Of The Most Defining Moments In Everyone’s Love Lives
1. Your First Love
When you first fall in love, it’s a beautiful thing. Many people forget that being capable of truly loving is a gift and first love is the most generous of all the love we’re going to give in our lifetimes. First loves are untainted by the reality of emotions. Innocence and ignorance is bliss. Although you may be aware of the risks and the negatives that can happen in love, it isn’t a constant memory — you have no wounds in your heart and mind tearing at you when you are experiencing love for the first time.
How you are in love with your first love is a truly defining moment. Feelings overwhelm you. The rush of passion and excitement. Reason takes the backseat to those intense feelings. Even skeptics begin to wonder if fairy tales truly exist.
In love, we show our true colors. With our loved ones, we show our true selves.
With your first love, you find out who you are and who you want to be. How much you love and how you naturally show it, will emerge. How you communicate, your tempers and flaws, your perception and expectations of relationships and significant others — they will all be laid out on the table for that one person and because of that one person. Your complete heart is in the center of that dinner table being served to them, hoping that they’ll realize your genuine feelings towards them.
You open yourself physically, emotionally, and intimately with them. Your heart and soul are an open book. You want them to know the real you. You want them to be the one you spend forever with. You want them to continue to love you for a long, long time. None of the thoughts in your mind at this point goes to the logistics or realities of being in a relationship.
In your first love, you love with your entire unscathed heart, with all the purity and excitement of a child’s first White Christmas, and with no hesitancy. You give them your all and you give them your everything. Every moment is a first. Every first becomes an ingrained memory, the bar set for the future. How you are in love the first time you’re in love says a lot about the person you are — the kind of lover you are and the kind of love you have to give.
2. Falling Out Of Love
When and if you fall out of love with your first love is also another defining moment in someone’s life.
If you fall out of love with your first love, you have to come back to the roots and find out why you’re no longer in love with them. The fact that always stays constant is that everybody changes. You may try to blame your partner that they’ve changed so that’s why things didn’t work out, but if you look in the mirror, you’ll also see that you’ve changed and now are seeing things differently than the goon-eyed boy or girl you were before.
Why are you no longer in love with them? If you’ve started developing feelings for someone else, what does that say about you? How did that happen? If you just realized they weren’t someone you could see a future with anymore, then do you know what kind of person you could see a future with?
I say falling out of love with specifically your first love because everything after the first wound has reasons that are more complicated and more layered from the truth and foundation of their heart, but how and why you fall out of love each time you do is a defining moment because it will show your true character, your true intentions, and your true heart.
Many people never fall out of love with their first loves, but they just try to bury that reality by forcing themselves to find someone new to love. There’s nothing wrong with still loving your first love. But there is something wrong if you’re trying to force yourself to forget them and get over them by trying to love someone else. In the end, you’re hurting someone that truly cares about you, because you weren’t ready to move on completely and give your full self to someone else.
Your first love will always, always be with you because they were your first. The first person you were vulnerable with, the first person you opened your heart to, the first person that became your everything at that point in time. Needless to say, they will always be special to you. However, there is a difference between still being in love with your first love and simply valuing the first love that you had shared. If your first love is still a priority over your current love or significant other, chances are there are still some unresolved emotions and attachments there. Resolve them before you even think about trying to see other people.
3. Coping With The End
There are two different paths depending on if you’re the one who got dumped or whether you were the one that did the dumping. But bottom line is: Be considerate. Breaking up with each other doesn’t mean you stopped completely caring about each other, so it’s no excuse to start being rude and nasty or going on new fancy dates right away. Of course, a lot of relationships end up that way because that’s how the hurt and pain manifest itself. But in the end, there are a lot of regrets when those are acted upon.
How you cope with the pain of losing your first love is another defining moment in your life, and out of these three moments — it’ll be the one that shapes you the most. Wounds carve themselves into your everyday life and you have to continue bearing them for the rest of your life. The first cut is truly the deepest. First love can let you feel the most positive emotions for the first time, but with the loss of first love, you realize that it also lets you feel the most negative set of emotions for the first time too.
Anger. Blame. Spiraling-downward depression and low self-esteem. Thoughts of revenge.
A few people close themselves off from everyone. Some seek others for help. Others turn to their hobbies or turn to new obsessions. Others pretend that everything is fine and push those feelings into the depths of their hearts. Others seek other people to fill the gaping hole in their heart and life, seeking simply another person to fill the void.
How much you let the loss affect you and how you handle it defines you as a person. How long you let yourself seethe in the negative emotions, what kind of negative thoughts you have, where you put the blame of the relationship ending, what you do after it — they all say something about you as a person. There is a certain amount of time where negative emotions are healthy but sooner or later, it begins to wrap you and keep you in the past that’s no longer going to come back.
There is a certain mental and emotional strength to want to move on, and another degree of strength to take action and actually go through the process of moving on. Moving on healthily is re-discovering your love for yourself without another person validating your worth. It’s discovering your independence and strength again. It’s accepting that things didn’t work out for a reason. It’s realizing what those reasons are and learning from the entire experience for the future experiences you are going to have. It is reconciliation and true, genuine forgiveness. You realize what you learned, what you needed, what you didn’t want, what you do want in the future. You are now more experienced and more knowledgeable, and you are thankful for that.
Whether you’re still stuck in the negativity over your first love’s break up, still hung up and hoping for your first love to come back to you, or you’ve come to terms with how things ended and are slowly taking steps to move on, you come to realize a lot about yourself. After a break up, you will grow tremendously and you will no doubt change — whether for better or for worse is all on you.
There is no doubt that going through one or all of these life situations will change and define you as a person. You won’t be the same person as you were before experiencing them. And I think in the end, that’s a good thing. People were meant to change and grow, learn and grow, be hurt and shaped, to be healed and shaped again, to be loved and changed for the better. If you aren’t growing, you aren’t truly experiencing, and if you aren’t experiencing, you aren’t truly living.
Live and embrace these defining moments, and discover who you truly are. 