Category: Falling in Love

Dear Stranger,

I have thought long and hard about why it is that I find falling in love with you so easy. This question has kept me up at night and quite frankly consumed much more time than I am comfortable with disclosing, so in the spirit of closure and giving myself some peace of mind, I am writing to you with a list of all the reasons I have come up with. This may seem pointless to you. I assure you it is not. First, however, I must give some background because while ambiguity is great and all, not understanding a love letter completely maybe even worse than writing a cheesy one.

I have lived many romances. Too many, if I may say so myself. First, there are the ones that lasted years, the ones my Mother swore over and over again would be my last. These are the ones people get tattoos for. And then, then there are the ones that lasted seconds, eye contact between the both of us when we are waiting at the traffic light.

It happens like this: the light is red, the cars are obediently waiting, all lined up, and the radio starts to play an extraordinary song – “The Immortals” by Kings of Leon – and it is your favorite song. You are amazed by the serendipity of this world and you catch yourself smiling. How, among all the possible songs in the world, did your favorite play on that radio station, at that particular moment?

It is like life has recognized your fine taste in music and has decided to reward you for it. And then, you look sideways and, in the car next to you, there is someone smiling at you. It is swift eye contact, a smile exchanged, it can something be incredibly intense or as superficial as a barbie doll’s, but you always smile back.

These visceral moments. These romances. These are the ones that are and always will be, my favorites. Strangers. My obsession with you, my Stranger, has been long-running and may never see an end; but after many nights of restless sleep and obsessive note-taking, I feel that I have gotten a further understanding of why I am so painfully, fiercely, overwhelmingly in love with you. Here it is.

Reason Number 1: There is nothing more romantic than being a complete Stranger to someone. Alternatively, there is nothing more mysterious than being a complete Stranger to someone. There is also nothing more romantic than mystery. That sheer amusement of them not knowing who you are at 3 AM. Of them not knowing how you like your coffee – or even if you prefer iced tea. Not knowing about the scar behind your left thigh and that the story it comes with is way more embarrassing than tragic. Not knowing about the nights you’ve wasted rewatching “The Big Sick” over and over again or even about the acute, and quite frankly absurd, hate that you harbor for pickles. This possibility of embodying an enigma is, in my opinion, also one of the most romantic things there are.

This, of course, also works both ways. The desire that we feel stirring up inside of us, the insatiable need to know all about their dreams and desires, is because they present us with a mystery that we want to figure out. We want to get to know them through hour-long conversations. We want to know what’s beneath their lopsided smile and luscious head of hair. For a lack of a more poetic simile, like when peeling an onion, we want to peel off a Stranger’s layers. We would like to know them for who they are, but the thing is we will more than likely never get a chance to find out. That’s the catch, and that is why we want them so much more; their impossibility.

Reason Number 2: You deeply crave to be someone else. When you are a Stranger to someone, there exists a vast territory to explore, but you are only able to see within the first hundred yards. When you are a Stranger, there is not much material to pick apart, to analyze. Nothing exceeds the exterior plane, almost like any kind of depth would just succeed at breaking the magic you have cast around yourself. When you are a Stranger to someone, the wise quote by Kurt Vonnegut suddenly makes sense, and we become exactly what we pretend to be. In the end, no one is going to take off your mask because no one will even notice you are wearing one. It is by being a Stranger that we end up acting according to inconstancy and occasions and chaos. We jump into uncertain opportunities that aren’t always safe, but it doesn’t matter because we never wait until the end to see what happens. It is living the unpredictable, and almost hearing Robbie Williams’ voice whispering ‘Carpe Diem’ in your ears and actually deciding to seize the day.

Reason Number 3: You have a vast imagination. This one is especially true for me because imagining peoples’ lives is a great way to kill time when on the 2 train on the subway ride home. For example, on Thursday when I saw you sitting against the window I envisioned a reckless guy, probably from Boston, that didn’t like being told what to do and couldn’t help but talk back even when he shouldn’t. In my head, you were someone charismatic and impatient, and loyal. I do not care to know if this is true or not. I would like you to stay this way.

The thing with my imagination is that it seems to be crushed when I think of people I know. It’s tedious. People I’ve met, cannot be anyone I want them to be. I already know that Abby is irritable and Mark likes tennis and Josephine never shuts up about her pet poodle Princess. They are not malleable. On the other hand, with people who I’ve just encountered in the supermarket line or seen on the other side of a crowded bistro, I can perfectly fit them into the persona I have in my mind, and it doesn’t matter how radical or far-fetched it is because there exists such space between them and me that there is no limit. However, this world-building of sorts is not a light hobby. In order for someone to craft identities so meticulously and also love these Strangers as much as I do, time and dedication are required.

Reason Number 4: You are very bored with your life and may also be unhappy with the people around you. This is not to be confused with me saying you have some deep-seated discontent with your whole life at the moment, this just means that those who you interact with have possibly not satisfied your ever-expanding imagination (mentioned in Reason Number 3).

It must be noted that time spent on falling in love – which is very time-consuming by itself – and conceiving the stories of complete Strangers, inevitably takes time away from thinking about your acquaintances and loved ones. Whoever decides to dedicate themselves to the art of falling in love with Strangers, for whichever reason it may be, must beware of the consequences. Falling in love with Strangers can bring unprecedented problems in the realm of tangible relationships. Your friends will not understand that Strangers, too, can be beloved and cherished with the same passion one does a husband or a wife. My advice, ignore them.

Reason Number 5: You hate disappointment. In my opinion, it is by getting to know someone that everything goes to waste. The upside of falling in love with a Stranger is that you completely eliminate the risk of getting your heart broken or bruised. In a way, it is easier to want what you can’t have. Complete Strangers can be adored and revered and chalked up to perfection because that’s all they are. Strangers. Oh, the pros of becoming infatuated from afar. When you get to know someone, the charming words that once sounded effervescent and unique now sound like cheap quotes and nothing more. The electrifying touch, that once made you ignore your mother’s voice ringing in your head telling you not to speak or touch Strangers, now is just a simple caress. And all the quirks that once seemed oddly lovely, like the way he used to eat olives and right after, take a sip of his apple juice, now are annoying and obnoxious. It is by getting to know someone that you realize that everything is a matter of time.

And here ends the theory. We fall out of love for the same reasons we once fell in.

On some days I get really depressed for these reasons. For knowing that love is just an illusion, a showcase where the first impression is the one that with time turns out to be what it wasn’t, or better even, what it didn’t seem to be. And also nothing ends in a poetic way. People have this stupid habit of wanting to turn everything into poetry. And all the tears were never, not even for a second, poetry worthy. They were just wet.

I remember walking in my junior year of high school in 2016, I walked in having no hopes to experience nor find intimate love during my high school years. It was simply that I could not feel it up until this year of high school and I found everyone quite boring and thought at the time, that I was the only one that thought what I was thinking, that love is not real and there’s no such thing as love. Alas that all changed when I walked into the 6th period and saw this beautiful black-haired goddess and sat right in front of her. Until one day I ended up talking to her out of sheer boredom and turned around to ask her for a pencil and on that day it was her big brown eyes that saved me from my loneliness, we talked for 2 hours straight about the world, drugs, suicide, music, and even sexual intercourse and what our perspective of those things was and how we experienced them, it felt so amazing to talk to someone that had a lot more empathy and sympathy than I did and at the time I didn’t know what was happening to me. Now is love real or is it just an illusion and is there such a thing that is associated with fate or destiny in love? Love is just a chemical action in your brain that wants to make you breed giving us strong urges like sexual attraction over time. I think love is real because when you feel it, It makes you a brighter person and happier, Love makes you feel as if you can do anything, and Humans today feel a strong human connection to another person which is known as love or can be interpreted as

I think love is real because it makes you a happier and brighter person because it says in (How love makes you happier and healthier by Matt Gersper) that “Love fights stress and in today’s society Americans feel 44% more stressed than they did five years ago”. That is an absurd number and it also says that “ They’re so many benefits to being in love that it puts you in a better mood and increases oxytocin levels that help reduce anxiety and stress and too much stress can help in medical problems that include headaches, sexual dysfunction, and problems sleeping”. Love in many ways is something special to us humans and many other animals that live in this small world called earth. Falling in love makes you feel infinite and empowered like you can do anything and having proclaimed that this experience of falling in love this the kind of delusion which not in any way represents true passion, let me state by changing into the side and pointing out that falling in love is in fact very, Very just about true love. So, the idea that falling in love in the form of passion is so powerful that this experience of true passion when we expand our boundaries through passion, we do so by reaching out, then to speak, toward the beloved, whose development we want to have in our life. It’s also who we want to be with cause people tend to believe in soulmates and fate even though that doesn’t exist so we start to think that the only person that’s meant for us and want to be assured of it.

What about our brain just seeing something and wanting to mate with it and the chemicals it produces when we see an attractive person? But perhaps then, the real illusion is that we expect love to be as effortless and natural as that initial feeling of falling. Yet once those dizzying romantic neurochemicals have subsided, we are baffled to find an individual in front of us who is as flawed, complex, and frustrating much like ourselves. But we are all flawed because no one is truly perfect I also don’t believe that love in and of itself is an illusion. Fooling us into believing that there is one ‘soul mate’ out there who is capable of completing us and saving us from life’s inevitable failures and unexpectancies. This sort of thinking negates us from the personal responsibility of being the best version of ourselves we can be. It directs us to someone else to drape ourselves over and use as a handicap during life, rather than learning to exercise our muscles so we are strong enough to stand on our own and do what we want and be free. It leaves us in a maze that has no opening, searching, and searching, getting nowhere. So this would mean that love is real but people tend to dive too much into it and start thinking about things beyond humanity because it excites us in the possibility that the universe is granting us something when in turn the universe is really not and as humans, we like to fantasize that there’s something controlling our fate because we don’t want to think about the possibility that life is just a series of coincidences and no matter how we look at them there just coincidences nothing more and nothing less.

“This is why you should not be in a relationship in the 21st century” Feriel Oueslati

From the cradle to your tomb, you live in a world where love is its core. Love used to be such a powerful word that death would be welcomed with open arms if it meant saving the other half from any possible harm, where sacrifices were made in a heartbeat; the chivalrous kind of love. We all have drooled over pictures of soldiers leaving their loved ones behind during World War I with an uncertainty of ever reuniting or hearing about that prince who abdicated his throne for the love of his life, leaving power and wealth over an infatuation. Love used to be seen as a godly power until recently. Today love is a word, a fantasy, a utopia everyone wants to reach but is failing at doing so. Unfortunately, it has lost all its meaning and depth. We got to the point where we messed up while redrawing the lines of love and created a monster behind such an innocent and pure feeling. We also got to the point where the relationship’s basic settings changed.

As rare as it may sound, love has always been and will forever be around. The core is still as pure as the times of Adam and Eve and if two love each other, no obstacle or threat would tear them apart. Relationships are still happening, people are still getting married, and children are still getting born. As a famous example Prince Harry of England, Duke of Sussex, married Meghan Markle in two thousand eighteen: An American, An Afro-American, An actress, and a divorcee. He went above the English protocol as well as the official church of England and Queen Elizabeth herself to marry the woman he loved. He played with his integrity and the title he owned for her and that is proof that love is not completely dead after all. We have also the Example of Connor McGregor, a famous Boxer whose wife sacrificed her time and efforts to take care of her husband and maintain him financially while he rehearsed for fights. She took several jobs and sold many valuable items to pay for rent, food, and medicine. That’s also proof that love is still real because no one would expect anyone to sacrifice all this for love.

Despite the existence of this feeling, we live in a consumerist culture of ‘if it is broken, put it in the trash and replace it” certainly not the kind where you detect the error and find the way to fix it. They believe that everything is replaceable, that there’s always better or as they say it so well ‘there is plenty of fish in the sea’. Since the 1980s, the world has experienced the longest and uninterrupted economic expansion in history. products got differentiated, diversified, and personalized thus making man adopt the same way of choosing the woman he wants to date as the way they would choose a phone or a laptop. First, as a spoiled consumer, he would be sorting out between ten dozen brands, colors, features, and capacity to every single detail of the product he would be satisfied with because when a consumer gets used to diversification, he becomes picky. Furthermore, both genders approach love as a business-deal negotiation, they start thinking about what the other would add to the table; what tangible or intangible asset is he or she going to gain by dating the other. Here is the first reason for not falling in love in the 21st century; love lost all its humanity and turned out to be a business project.

We all watch Netflix and drool over the millions of Romance movies like “To all the boys I have loved before”, “Three steps above heaven”, or “Kissing booth”. We get the impression that love is uncomplicated and plain. It’s all rainbows and butterflies and the happy ending is unavoidable. The entertainment scene implanted in our brains a fake image of an effortless relationship and people started to make that mirage a “reality”. Our reality is that the other half, the soulmate will come on a white horse and live happily ever after. People started to want the concept of “relationship” without working any day to maintain it, shivers and butterflies in the stomach without the compromises and hard times, hand-holding without giving your partner the power of hurting you in their hands because that is the fundamental concept of love; giving your lover the power to hurt you but trusting them not to do so. They want to celebrate anniversaries without spending three hundred sixty-five days working and fighting in order to keep the relationship alive, not wanting to need someone but wanting to be hopelessly needed. We like the idea of searching and chasing for love but we loathe the mere possibility of falling into it. Therefore, the second reason for not falling in love in the 21st century is that people are Gamophobic which is an irrational and inexplicable fear of commitment.

Since the 80s, women’s lives radically changed after the long and tiring battle that led them to their freedom. Indeed, thanks to the emancipation of women, they joined the labor force making them earn money thus becoming financially independent and by that, they detached themselves from marriage and the idea of the man providing and taking care of them. Indeed, women became career-driven the second they have gotten the chance. Women started attending colleges making them aware and cultured thus getting detached from that image of the housewife to become the entrepreneur, the surgeon, the politician…personal success became a priority; becoming someone by her own means and efforts was a necessity, and living in her potential husband’s shadow was out of the equation. In the past century, women were getting married because society was expecting them to prioritize marriage, children, buying a house, and the whole family packed up to this century where love, relationships, and marriage would be at the end of each and everyone’s bucket list.

Someone once said “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.” As egoistic as it may sound, self-achievements have been prioritized by women after a long and tiring battle against sexism. Men also prioritized careers these days. In fact, love and children are at the bottom of both genders’ priorities list. Consequently, the reason for not being in a relationship in the 21st century is that people became career-driven therefore not caring about love anymore.

Finally, we live in an era of Globalization where all one hundred ninety-five countries are interrelated from exchanging production, food, species, and culture to even people. We live in a world that became a small city where any information can be easily exchanged with a simple click and where love letters are sent in a digital format. A modern means of communication. The Internet is the trick here. Thanks to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or even chat rooms like Omegle, Chatroulette… Meeting new people from all over the world is possible nowadays. The era of falling in love with the girl or boy next door is now long gone because in the 50s, you grow up in the same city you’re going to study, work, get married, and pass away in. You get a sample of the population to choose from and if you’re extremely lucky, you will meet approximately one hundred girls in your lifetime. Falling in love and choosing someone was not the hardest chore. In the 21st century thought and all thanks to Tinder or any social media platform in general, you don’t get a sample of the population anymore but rather the whole population to choose from Any type, nationality, music genre, hair color, body shape… you have the possibility to really choose “the one in seven billion people”. It all sounds wonderful but it’s actually awful since you can always be replaced, there is always better than you. The range of choice is much wider than ever before so there will always be a more handsome guy or a curvier girl, a shiner smile, or the bluest eyes. You start to shop for a wife or husband on Amazon: “Do you like it? Let’s put it on the wish list until further notice”. Thanks to dating apps or dating websites like Match.com or OkCupid.com, you literally shop for a husband, you check a catalog of women hoping to swipe right into a love story because, in the 21st century, Generation Z thinks that love can be downloaded on Google Play or on Apple store.

Social media also created tension in the couple since Internet has weakened Trust. Effectively, the girl has no control over who is texting her boyfriend or the boyfriend has no idea who his other half is talking to. After all, secret conversation on Messenger encrypted chat rooms or just deleting phone calls exists. This paranoia and this lack of trust could only result in unhealthy relationships. “She’s not being faithful”, and “His Phone line is busy, he must be talking to another girl”. The said boy could be innocent and has only been loyal the whole time but the mere possibility of a betrayal pops up in her mind anyways resulting in the rate of fighting that will increase; it could be innocent fights or maybe some more severe ones like verbal harassment, physical harassment, depression…

There is one last issue with the presence of the Internet in relationships, what we call the “Catfish”. The definition of Catfish is a persona you create online which is a useful tool to lure people into relationships. With the power of the web, you could create a whole other identity for yourself by using a fake photograph, a fake name, and an address to even fake your self-interests; you become whatever the other wants you to be. It has ruined an important aspect of love which is to be accepted as you are. The catfish is also committing a major crime of Fraud or identity theft which is illegal. The possible outcomes of such an experience could lead to horrible disasters like kidnapping, rape, and in some extreme cases death. This concept became so popular that they created a whole Television reality show on MTV under the same name “Catfish”.

Here is yet another reason for not falling in love in the 21st century: social media ruined the fundamental concepts of love.

To conclude, love changed so much over the past century. We have heard of amazing Shakespearian love stories, how they used to court and steal kisses under the front porch. People used to go to war with their loved ones’ pictures on their wallets as Talisman. It was heroic, literally out of a movie script. Meanwhile, love today is just a word that used to mean a lot, a word that makes us all dream but is in fact just a remoted island no one can reach because people see love as a business project, they are also scared of any kind of commitment that ties them down and makes them weak. Furthermore, women’s focus rotated towards their careers, self-achievements, and goals making family life a not-so-important goal to reach. Finally, social media created a wide range of choices making people seem inferior to one another and creating self-esteem issues. It can also create trust issues in a couple because of the rate of cheating that increased or just the concept of cheating that became easier. Love has to come back because it is the only good reason to stay alive, being loved and in love is the greatest gift god could have ever given us.

Références

1. Olesen, J., Sabr, Kaycee, Jenna, Londi, Eeriel, . . . Bg. (2014, February 09). Fear of Commitment Phobia – Gamophobia. Retrieved from https://www.fearof.net/fear-of-commitment-phobia-gamophobia/
2. Emancipation of women – Oxford Reference. (2017, June 16). Retrieved from http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803124525950

Human beings have a lot of necessities; eat, sleep, move, and breathe, but there is also one thing that for us is as essential as those already mentioned, love.

Love is a word that could not be described exactly with a worldwide definition, some say is an emotion, a feeling, a state of mind, a phase, a goal, or from a more medical point of view, love is a mix of a big amount of hormones produced by your brain that makes your body behave in a certain way thanks to a stimulation given by another human being. So, to enclose the things already said, love is a many-splendored thing that people search for all of their lives, even unconsciously.

As Dr. Nicki Nance, licensed psychotherapist, and professor at Beacon College in Florida, explains in a more evolutional way, love is a drive to keep the species in existence by reproduction (Hoyt, 2018), this necessity of reproduction conforms to the first stage of falling in love.

Before anything else, it is necessary to understand how this stage of sexual desire starts; basically, as it was said before, the human brain produces a lot of hormones that make human beings feel every emotion related to what we know falling in love is, for example, dopamine makes humans feel pleasure and happiness, oxytocin helps to be relaxed and feel those ‘loving emotions’ when an individual is stressed out or going through an anxiety phase and thinks or sees something related to that other person, and there are a lot of more hormones who contributes with this process. The main thing to know so is easy to understand this topic, is how hormones work in the human body. Basically, the body and the brain understand these hormones as drugs, so these become addicting once they are produced so regularly and hugely. The signs that tell when a human being is in love are; the heart starts to beat really fast, the systolic blood pressure (tells the maximum pressure executed by the heart) increases (Sheps, 2019), the body releases fat and sugars, the muscular capacity expands so generates more red blood cells to accomplish a better transport of oxygen in the blood (Domínguez, 2018). In other words, when an individual is in love, their body responds just as it does with exercise or some physical activity, falling in love expends a lot of energy and work.

Now, going back to the process, let’s proceed with the first stage already mentioned, sexual desire. What happens in this step is a purely physical attraction to another person, that makes humans behave in a completely non-smart way, doing a pretty foolish playing. The ventral tegmental area of the brain is the one that sets dopamine free to stimulate four essential parts of the brain: the Nucleus Accumbens, in charge of developing pleasure, laugh, fear, aggression, addiction, and placebo effect; the Septum Pellucidum or “translucent wall”, which is related to the neutral systems of the emotions (Collado, 2017); the Amygdala, who performs a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression); and the prefrontal cortex (Domínguez, 2018). Is obvious to notice that a lot of emotions or results are repeated in a lot of parts of the brain, but remember that the brain is a perfectly constructed working machine that develops these many sexual hormones thanks to each and every part, if something is wrong with one of this parts, the result would not be the same, for example, if something happened to the Amygdala, potentially there would be a case of Alzheimer that would not help the person to remember the feeling of the ‘drugs’ created by the brain, as a result, not being able to constitute the addiction.

In this next stage, the human body turns completely addicted to the sensation. These “drugs” make the person become dizzier and duller than before. These substances produced by the own brain are called ‘Endogenous Hormones’, assembles in the cerebral cortex. When a person is in love, dopamine, oxytocin, and phenethylamine, the hormone of smell and one of the main neurotransmitters of the brain, increase 7000 times than the normal prescription the brain develops. Dopamine increments desire but phenethylamine is the one that gives the feeling of love; the brain gets under an effect similar to the one it gets with Amphetamines, all because of dopamine, oxytocin, and norepinephrine, a hormone of stress and a neurotransmitter similar to adrenaline who increases blood pressure and sugars, take place together. Something important to keep in mind is that neurotransmitters are the ones who produce sentimental arrangements when the brain is stimulated, with that, is better to understand that when serotonin decreases and the brain reward centers become full of dopamine and norepinephrine, the person is numb and foolish, as a result of the effect caused in the brain being the same as consuming a really addicting drug. (Domínguez, 2018)

In stage three, the person in love goes from passional love to real love, this means, because of what happens in the last stage, humans lose the capacity for concentration and rationalization, by reason of being in love consumes a lot of resources, mental and physical; for that cause humans can’t stay in a period of falling in love forever, the body and the brain gets tired and causes this action goes against its surviving instinct. According to the professionals Dr. Ortega and Dr. Gasset, this “Transitory stupidness” last between 6 months and 3 years, but after this period of time, can happen two things, that drive the process to its last and most decisive stage of falling in love. (Domínguez, 2018)

Finally, in this phase, the brain needs to make a decision and it can be this next two: firstly, can get pretty addicted to the high amounts of these substances and leave the person who used to give it those stimulations to find them with someone else, just to repeat the addicting feeling. The other thing that can happen is that, as time pass by, the organism becomes resistant to these hormones, so it starts to disappear gradually but without producing any kind of anxiety or uncomfortableness while leaving behind those drugs effects, that is why, here the brain and body begin to control those doses and it comes a feeling of security, comfortableness, and peace.

The human brain is an amazing and perfectly working machine, love is just part of its functioning and necessities. The sentence “find real love” can be actually very accurate because the human is on the work of looking for that stimulation that its brain does not get tired of, that is why the search for a partner comes with nature and it is part of the pure instinct of reproduction, but in another point of view, it is also a need of the brain to release and create those amount of hormones, cause the body needs it and one or maybe the only effective way or reason that can achieve that is love. Love is important, love is necessary, and love is a must for every single living creature.

Being in love; who would’ve knew that such an idyllic feeling could be so complex and stressful at the same time. Falling in love was one of the best experiences of my life – I just wish I was more mature at the time to appreciate it.

For the longest time, even at a young age, I never thought I’d fall in love. I’ve always been over-obsessed with how I look and deeply self conscious about my weight. I often thought (on a daily basis), “If I can’t even love myself, how do I expected someone to love me?”

Looking back, I didn’t have anything to be self conscious about. I was an average looking teenage girl who was succeeding in school and living life to the fullest with her my friends. I regret complaining about being “too fat” or “too spotty” when in reality I hadn’t experienced these hurdles to their full extent. A hard pill for me to swallow was that, in fact, I was just a normal girl who was completely engulfed in her physical appearance rather than enjoying my life as a young girl.

Falling in love for the first time is a memory that I will always remember so vividly. The butterflies, a knotted stomach and an overwhelming, almost painful, fast-paced heartbeat; all emotions that will only be experienced once to their full potential.

I was only fourteen the first, and only, time I fell in love. It was unlike anything I had ever came across before. Of course, I had my “perfect idea” of what love was. The stereotypical romantic boys who will make you happy, content and bring you flowers all while making sure you feel beautiful everyday. One of my favourite romance movies, ‘Titanic’, gave me a false sense of what love was too as it gave me the impression that boys will go above and beyond to make you happy. Nonetheless, if truth be told, I didn’t have a clue what it was truly similar to until I encountered it personally but it definitely was not like the movies.

Now that I have had an involvement with love, I can look back and catch sight that my view of being hopelessly enamoured was significantly exaggerated, unrealistic and couldn’t be further from truth. I can’t comprehend why I believed that love was this blissful, magical feeling that had no complications but I am so thankful I have strayed far from these far fetched, fairytale-like scenarios. I did not recognize the hard truth about love, especially about the difficulties that would be implicated.

Having such solid emotions about someone else, at only fourteen, gave me uncomfortable, uncontrollable shivers down my spine. It made me revaluate all my past beliefs, rules and boundaries. In that moment, for the first time, I got to learn what it was like to truly care for another person (aside from my family.) Everything that I had thought and once represented, suddenly vanished, seemingly at the drop of a pen. I remember this immense wave of satisfaction and pleasure rage through me as I saw a whole new side of emotion open up for me. I underestimated how strong the feeling of love was until I finally got the chance to encounter it.

When you encounter such a rush of ecstasy at such a young age it’s a lot to handle. Although, it allowed me to have a open mind about many more experiences that awaited me. Love allowed me to have a greater perspective on life; I was no longer caught up on my physical appearance, I worried less and became visibly radiant.

Unfortunately, I relied on the person I loved so substantially that I forgot how to love myself in the process. My family became less relevant; I was no longer dependent on them. I spent every breath with the man I fell in love with that I forgot about those who were there from the start. Looking back, I can see why this was a foolish mistake as there was no promising he would stay. If I could change my actions I definitely would for the simple fact that I wouldn’t of became so dependent on someone who could’ve easily been a time waste. My family and friends should’ve been my priority but when you’re in love, they become your priority and you can’t bear to spend a minute without them.

From there on in, my heart would practically do a backflip any time I got to spend time with him. I was unhealthily addicted but I couldn’t stop myself; I had no self control. All my emotions and feelings were running in overdrive. A simple smell of his aftershave could keep me feeling protected and content. Your first love makes you crazy, in the sense that, you just can’t get enough of them and wholeheartedly hope you can spend the rest of your life with them. The first experience of love makes you feel like there is no one on the planet that could compare to this one person.

Looking back, I can understand why I was so obsessed over this one man. It was a brand new feeling, sensation even, for fourteen year old me to process. I couldn’t keep any of my feelings to myself so I let them show all at once, like a toddler having a tantrum. I can see that although I’ve experienced different kinds of love since my first, nothing else will ever feel quite like that for the simple fact that, the first love will always be the most memorable.