Is the one we never forget, the saying goes. But maybe that’s not always the case.
So many times I have happened to hear, in my work, that it was not considered important, just a trivial adolescent crush, not a serious thing.
Instead, you then discover that precisely that the little teenage love story had a decisive, fundamental importance in the evolution of life.
To understand, we need to take a step back and go back to those moments, when you felt that the other person, and noone else, made you feel emotions you never felt before. It is difficult to say why it was that person, impossible to analytically evaluate the reasons. That smile, that gesture, that way of doing things, that movement that gives you butterflies in your stomach. Some have ventured as far as to say: I seem to have known this person forever!
As if the other corresponded to something of ours unknown to ourselves, an image, that the other represents us. And if this love is reciprocated, it changes our life. It allows us to sweep away, in one fell swoop, even a childhood not lived too happily.
Frankly, I would like to wish these emotions even to older people. I do not think at all that they are exclusive to adolescence. However, it is true that very often these enthralling moments of falling in love are no longer found in adulthood. I will say more, they often get lost very soon. Why?
Life is not simple and feeling good is not a static fact given once and for all, rather it is characterized by movement. You can’t stop that happy moment and if you try to repeat it, you risk being deeply disappointed.
Sometimes I happen to hear couples who have remained together for their whole life since they first fell in love as teenagers, but they are not always very happy couples, where the word Love is decidedly nuanced.
Then perhaps the real problem lies in the separation, that is the moment in which you risk “forgetting” your first love.
But what does it mean to forget your first love? Certainly, you do not forget about the other person, what their name is, if they are blonde or brunette. In this case, it would be a serious neurological disorder. Instead, it is as if something of oneself is lost, lost forever in the other that goes away, thus leading to a serious loss of vitality. And from here the “mature” relationships will follow.
Many feel this risk and rightly manage to keep that deep, completely physiological sadness in a relationship that ends.
But after this more or less long period, you wake up one morning and discover that the sadness has passed, that you appreciate that smile of a person you have met by chance and you feel different, better than before, the beautiful image of that love story. It is now firmly within you, having enriched you and made you ready to relive another love.
Sometimes, however, the sense of emptiness linked to the idea of losing a loved one or, more correctly, of losing that dimension unknown to oneself, that image that the other represented to us, brings out a very deep anguish. As if we were no longer able to take back within ourselves that something that the other represented to us, as if the other was concretely that something and, by losing the other, there would be a definitive loss that could never be remedied. Hence, the desperate attempt to keep the other to oneself in all possible ways.
But the most negative reaction is the cold one that leads to finding a substitute the next day, the one in which the image of the other and one’s relationship with the other is completely erased and perhaps forever, as if that relationship had never existed or, at most, had been a “trivial adolescent crush.”
Obviously the culture in which we are immersed, that of the “cheer up, you’ll get over it”, does not help but rather tends to consider those physiological moments of sadness necessary to process a separation, as something to be removed as soon as possible by any means.
So come on, let’s not forget our first love, even if it ended badly, perhaps with a betrayal or a sudden and incomprehensible rejection. But everything that was there before must not disappear. It must remain within us to allow us to find many other first loves!
Marco Michelini
Thanks to Ray Williams for the translation of this article.
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