A few weeks ago, I decided to start a two-day poll on Twitter and asked my followers "Who do you consider your first love?"
As their options, I listed the following: 1) your current partner, 2) your high school sweetie, 3) an ex (unspecified), and 4) the "what are we" partner. A total of thirty-five votes were tallied, with the majority of votes falling on option number one, "your current partner".
The breakdown for the votes looked a lot like this: forty percent of votes went to option number one, twenty-nine percent of votes went to option number two, twenty-six percent of votes went to option number three, and five percent of votes went to option number four, which quite honestly I was a little surprised to see. But what had shocked me most was that the majority of people who voted on my poll consider their first love to be their current partner.
Do they really think that their first love is their current partner? Do they even know what a first love is or what it means?
I thought to myself. Part of me had gone as far to wonder if they answered "your current partner" because they felt bad for saying that their current partner wasn't their first love. Some people want to be their partner's first love so badly, which as Oscar Wilde says is their clumsy vanity.
Taking that into account, my current partner and I are well aware that we aren't each other's first loves, but we understand that, and it isn't something that makes us love each other anymore or less, or takes away from our relationship and the bond that we've created. However, I know that there are some people who consider their current partner to be their first love and there's a reason for that.
Because so many people had voted their current partner as being their first love, I decided to delve deeper and asked my followers to complete a second poll, specifically those who answered that their current partner is their first love.
In a tweet, I wrote: "Okay, so if you answered your first love being your current partner, when did you start dating them?"
I listed the following as their options: 1) started in middle school, 2) started in high school, 3) started after high school, and 4) started in college. For this poll, a total of twenty-one votes were tallied, with the majority of votes falling on option number two, "started in high school."
These results made it clear to me that my followers were most likely dating their high school sweetheart, so it's no wonder that they consider them to be their first love. At a high school level, they were probably their first serious relationship, as well as many other firsts.
When I think about my first love, I am greeted with memories of coffee-caffeinated eyes, the racing heart of a fifteen-year-old girl, and the electricity of my very first kiss. I am reminded of how much love consumed me, and in that same respect, how sadness had taken me hostage in the deepest corners of my heart when that love was taken away. For me, my first love came in the form of a seventeen-year-old boy who was two years my senior.
Looking back on the naive fifteen-year-old girl I was, there were a lot of flaws that I had been blind to at the time of that relationship: I had mistaken shared interests as being signs that we were soulmates, I spent more time waiting for his calls than spending time with him, I had written fantasies of permanence over who really stood before me, and worst of all, the lack of confidence and self-esteem in myself had reflected immensely in my relationship in the form of jealousy and insecurity.
No matter how much he had tried to reassure me of his feelings for me, it was always so hard for me to accept. You can give someone the world to show them you love them, but in the end, it's up to them to be able to realize how genuine your feelings truly are.
Not everyone experiences the same type of first love. There are first loves that will undoubtedly run you into the ground, show you a side of yourself that you may have never known you had, or flat out terrify you. But one thing that is for certain is that it helps teach you lessons that you wouldn't learn otherwise.
The term "first love" is very subjective. What it could mean for you could be completely different from what it means to someone else. Some people define it as the first person to have ever meant anything to them, some people define it as the first person to have really hurt them, and some people, if they're lucky enough, define it as a word synonymous to their husband/wife.
