In other words, our personal definition of love is based upon everything we went through with our firsts. The way our caregivers treated us growing up can also, in part, affect how we attach to our first loves.įor example, if you had a parent or mentor who "made it very hard for you to trust, neglected you emotionally was very critical or not as available as you needed them to be," that can influence the kind of person you're drawn to.Īll of these feelings and experiences we had with our first loves then become a "blueprint" for how we approach relationships later on in our lives. Dardashti called it - but for most people, the strength of the emotions is what's most important. Some people might consider someone a first love if they felt a strong physical connection with that person - if they felt "swept away," as Dr. Dardashti said first loves give us our first "deep emotional connection that haven't felt before." Normally when people talk about falling in love, they use words such as 'I feel like I'm high,' 'I feel euphoric,' 'I can't stop smiling' - those kinds of very intoxicated types of feelings. Niloo Dardashti, an adult and couples therapist in New York, about just how much our first loves influence us.ĭr. Regardless of how positively or negatively the experience unfolded, your first love influences how you approach romance in significant ways, even if you don't realize it. Thoughts of a first love are ripe with emotions, be them good, bad or a complicated mixture of the two. It's your first time experiencing yourself more selflessly than you ever thought you could be, feeling things you never thought you were capable of feeling toward anyone. It's your first taste of romance - that strange thing people always talked about in the movies that you finally really began to understand. Whenever and whomever it was, your experience with your first love is etched into your memory forever. Maybe the boy who smelled the least of body odor and Googled "penis" with you during computer class became someone for whom you felt something weird and frightening and exciting and new, and you called it love. Or maybe Cupid struck you during middle school, when you didn't even know the definition of the word yet and thought everyone who wasn't your best friend had cooties.
Or maybe you think of that time in college, when you became intoxicated by both your first taste of cheap alcohol and by that cute guy who approached you for a quippy conversation, which eventually turned into an exchange of numbers, a first date and a relationship in which you learned not every guy who says he loves you really means it. When you think about your first love, you might imagine yourself in the backseat of the used Volkswagen your parents got you for your seventeenth birthday, awkwardly fumbling around in the company of McDonalds cheeseburger wrappers and empty cans of Arnold Palmer.