The First Cut Is The Deepest: Why You Never Forget Your First Love
It's time to say thank you, close the door, and move forward.
Parilov / shutterstock By Gillian Watts
Many of us have a secret. Well, all of us do. However, you may not know that the same secret you hide away, you have in common with countless others.
You still think about your first love.
You’ve moved on. Yet for some reason, your first love still crosses your mind. You just can’t seem to recover from the split the way you have in other past relationships. You know you’re not still into them, so what does this mean?
The answer is simple. You were young and they were your first. Really, that’s it. It’s a bit of a loaded statement. At some point, you probably believed they’d be your only love and it’d last forever. Feelings ran so deep and then for one reason or another, things ended.
Here are the most common reasons your first love is still on your mind:
Life was constantly changing.
Particularly, if your first love occurred while you were still in school, you might not have actually wanted to be over. Graduation rolls around and choices have to be made. So, couples inevitably split up due to timing and accessibility.
You were moving toward life’s next step and realized you were walking in different directions. Sometimes sacrificing your future goals at that age is just too big a compromise to make when you’re not really ready for serious commitments.
However, if you were still in love, this can cause confusion later on when you reflect on the relationship. The truth is, you’ve both grown and changed. You don’t need to torture yourself with what-ifs. Be confident in the decisions you made because they got you to where you are today.
If you're still thinking about what you did yesterday, you haven't done much today.
You were young and you were still just getting to know yourself.
Quite possibly the biggest reason we think about our first loves is that, at that point in our lives, we were too young to really process and handle conflict. This means that if the issues that ended your relationship then occurred now, they probably wouldn’t result in a breakup.
We allowed for petty arguments and small issues to cause explosive breakups in our younger years. So of course, we are left with unresolved issues and uncertainty about what exactly happened.
It’s only amplified by the fact that, in our immaturity, we didn’t know how to go through the breakup and aftermath process gracefully. We didn’t fully process our emotions or cope with them constructively. We didn’t get closure.
You may think you miss your ex, but really, you probably just don’t know what happened with them. Nothing was ever really discussed or explained and you may not have healed properly from the first “burn.”
This is probably what makes the first breakup one of the hardest we go through. But, it’s important to realize some questions aren’t meant to be answered and, in this case, they probably aren’t worth asking because there aren’t answers anyway.
Your first love is part of who you are.
It’s a special part of the experience of growing up, and we learn a lot more than we realize from it when it comes to knowing ourselves and handling future relationships. Likely, you’re missing the time in your life more than the person you shared it with.
In all honesty, it’s okay to accept that you’ll carry that person and your experiences with you in life. They helped make you who you are and it’s time to say thank you, close the door, and move forward with all the confidence and self-awareness you’ve built.
Neither you nor I need to rehash the past, but we can accept the role that time, along with that person, played in our lives as we take on new challenges.
Gillian Watts is an editor for Unwritten and writer whose work has been published on Elite Daily, MissHeard Magazine, Her Track, and others.Visit her author profile for more.