Even if our first emotions go back several years, they continue to reside in us. Decryption of a feeling so special that time has no hold over it.
If no scientific study has ever been conducted on this subject, it is enough to mention it at a dinner with friends to understand that it is not trivial. In some of us, perhaps most, this love that we experience as a teenager or young adult (sometimes later) is the first one that causes the heart to race and the butterflies in the stomach. In this, it occupies a very special place.
The “very first time” effect!
Such a great resonance is not surprising. The feeling of the first time causes such wonder that people keep it deep inside themselves for a long time. It has in fact been shown, in particular by neuroscience, that the emotions we feel modulate the way in which events are inscribed in our memory.
The frustration of a never-ending story!
However, two parameters come into play in stories that we build around our youthful love. The first lies in what we experience afterwards: if the meetings which follow are disappointing, one can tend to idealize it.
The second is that it is very often an unfinished story in the sense that, in our young years, it is sometimes the circumstances which decide to the future of a relationship. This opens the field to the fantasy of an extraordinary outcome (‘with him / her, things would have been so different …’).
The temptation of social networks!
The question then arises of a possible reunion. Do we have an interest in “unearthing” a very old romance? Why not, if the memory is haunting and the curiosity too great.
It must be said that the times encourage us to do so. The rise of social media has reactivated the phenomenon. Today, it is easier to find someone, which greatly arouses curiosity. With, sometimes, some disappointments.
We can have remained mad with love by thinking that the other is on the same wavelength and find ourselves facing someone who no longer shares the same feelings at all. As often in love, the phase shift can make very bad.
The desire to start all over again!
This was the case with actress Macha Méril and composer Michel Legrand, who first fell in love in 1964. At the time, he was married and she was about to marry. They found themselves fifty years later and married! A beautiful story that the actress told in the book “Michel et moi”, which echoes others.
Of course, the body ages, life passes, sometimes souls are a little damaged, but what they lived together is there and it can be strong enough to restart a relationship, and find the best way to walk together, perhaps more in tenderness than in loving hold.
Nostalgia for our green years!
What if that lingering, haunting thought was ultimately a symptom of something else? A nostalgia that does not speak its name, a difficulty in being (well) in the present time. Maybe now is the time to investigate further to understand what the fantasy of our first love is hiding.
The interest in the love of youth was not based solely on the pleasure of evoking the one who has make our hearts beat in our young years. In fact, this love symbolizes youth in general and all that we would like to relive of it.
This inspires us to reflect on the passage of time. and will not come back. Unless you turn the tide and see this love of the past as a driving force behind the stories we have to live through today.
The young love is the proof that we have been able to experience and feel these emotions, so intense. The idea, of course, is not to seek to find exactly the same, but maybe to make it a motor for our love lives.
Reference: https://www.elitedaily.com/dating/understand-love-when-young/1086515
Photo de Jasmine Carter provenant de Pexels
