How You Learn To Love Again, And Why Your First Love Is Never The Greatest
By Kate Bailey
Everybody is always making a big fuss over the “first love” concept, and how it’s this life-changing thing that never really fades away. But I feel like while your first love is great, and probably shows you things about yourself that you didn’t know, and inevitably breaks your heart, what we should really be talking about is the second and third and fourth great loves that show us that we can feel that way for someone again.
After that “first great love” breaks your heart you get to thinking they’re one in a billion, the only fish in this sea that could possibly jive with you, that could possibly make you want to touch them all night and then just sit next to them while watching Netflix and go grocery shopping and talk about the annoying things that happened today and all the little, ridiculous nuances of everyday life that nobody else could possibly understand but them.
But one day, usually when we’re least expecting it, someone else comes along. Usually, we’re hesitant to love them. We think we’re broken and “we need time” when really it’s just an excuse to not be with someone because we’re too afraid of our own feelings. But what we realize, slowly, but then all at once, is that the person we have in our lives right now makes us happier than that other person did. They ended for a reason, and you don’t have to end what you have because of what happened in the past. It’s over, your thoughts are the only thing that keeps it alive.
And maybe we want to keep these things alive, because we can’t get over the fact that sometimes in life, we can love greatly and deeply but not forever. This is not what we were taught. We were raised on the notion that once we find someone we care about enough, we have to bind them together with us by law and conform to every convention set up for us to breed the next generation and live a blase life.
You don’t have to choose this. There will always be more love to find. It’s only ever a matter of getting over the fear of feeling again.