Falling in love can feel like a magical thing. When you meet someone and hit it off well with them, falling in love with them will make you feel like you’re walking on air. You feel like you’re flying through a gentle and comforting breeze, and there’s constantly a huge smile flashing across your face. As you try to think about other things, you can’t help but bring your mind back to the one you’ve been spending time with the most. It’s normal to feel like this. Everyone goes through these emotions every time they meet someone new, so go ahead and cherish it. But what if you’ve never been in a relationship and you meet your first love? How much harder can it be to maintain that high of love? Much harder than you think, take it from me.

I am currently in my first real relationship after meeting my first love on December 14th, 2015. The first two or two and a half months were amazing. He was all I could think about on a daily basis. I lost quite a bit of sleep thinking about how amazing he was and how much I loved and cared about him. I would wake up early in the morning on the days that I knew I was going to see him again, but it wouldn’t be until the afternoon. I was just too excited knowing that I was going to get to lay my eyes on him and get a huge hug from him again. Then, by the ending of February, it all changed.

It was nothing that he did or nothing that he said because he was and still is an amazing person who cares about me and loves me unconditionally. As cliché as it sounds, it wasn’t him, it was me. He spent the night and we slept in the same bed together. When we woke up, something changed within me. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Somehow, some way, the intense feelings of love suddenly vanished and I started to panic. I didn’t understand how or why I was feeling the way I was feeling because I did not even know what I was feeling in the first place. I tried to wrap my head around what my heart was feeling, but that was nearly impossible to achieve.

This type of mindset I was in was such a distraction for me, especially when it came to school. I tried my hardest to keep a smile on my face and focus on what I needed to focus on but there were times when I caught myself doing the dumbest things, answering the most simplest questions wrong, and just saying the most ludicrous things at the most unusual times. At this point, my boyfriend had no idea that I was feeling this way as I simply put it off as major stress from school. But that wasn’t the case. Something else was going on and I was trying my hardest to figure out what it was.

This was when I came across the concept of the honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase is the stage of every relationship where the intense emotions of love and the high feeling of being in love fade away. When you first meet someone, your brain releases a bunch of chemicals that make you feel as though there’s simply no gravity and you’re floating on air. But after some time, your brain cannot produce these chemicals and the high that you were just on simply disappears. When these emotions go away, it signals the end of the honeymoon phase. Many people mistake the end of the honeymoon phase for the end of the entire relationships, which causes them to become serial daters so they can establish the honeymoon phase over and over and over again. They fail to realize that when the honeymoon phase is over, it is the start of the next stage of the relationship: real, mature, and deeper love. The kind of love that isn’t built on lust, where you can’t keep your hands off each other. It is an unconditional love that only mature people have the mindset to establish with their partner.

It was from here that I was able to comprehend the fact that I was not falling out of love with my boyfriend. The love was still there but it was maturing. The idea of “what else is out there for me” wasn’t exactly crossing my mind as I thought it was. I was still in love with him and didn’t want anybody else. But the idea that my first love couldn’t be my last was so strong to ignore. However,I realized that it is completely possible for my first love to be my only love and that is exactly what I want with all of my heart.