When Northeastern senior Lily Jonhson started dating her first love, the only way she could describe how it felt was “easy.”
Johnson met her boyfriend last year when they were paired together for a dance competition. After dating for four months, they made it official, and like many first loves, it consumed them. Even though they spent all their time together, Johnson still worried that she wouldn’t experience the “spark” of firsts everyone raves about. She is no longer confused about whether her experience qualifies.
“It’s really just its own specific, very, very powerful experience. I think when you experience that for the first time, it really sticks with you because it’s not like anything else,” Johnson said. “I can totally understand why people get fixated on their first loves. I think if we ever broke up, which hopefully we don’t, I would probably fall victim to that, too.”
Johnson isn’t the only one to feel this way. Your first love is like a drug: it pulls you in and sticks with you, even when you and that person are broken up. There is also nothing to compare it to. It is singular and unique in a person’s life, and as such, often renders subsequent relationships unable to measure up.
Benjamin Compton, a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, studies courtship, flirting, sex and interpersonal relationships. He says one thing is certain: you never forget your first love. If things are going well, this can produce feelings like no other. But it can also be quite fraught for people if heartbreak is part of the love story.
Compton also believes that the novelty of first love compels people to constantly look back to recapture the way it feels: “We all have our favorite childhood meals, favorite movies, favorite childhood songs. But if you go back and watch it, it probably sucks. You’re probably like, wait a second! So I think nostalgia is a hell of a drug in the sense that we often ignore the ugly parts that weren’t the greatest. So, I also imagine nostalgia can be very powerful for people in regard to their first love.”
This is precisely the case for Northeastern sophomore Izzy Langiocola. Langiocola and her ex-boyfriend of almost three years, whom she believes was her first love, broke up during her freshman year of college due to long distance and communication issues.
“It’s so crazy because I have no idea what’s going on in his life, literally not the slightest; he’s also so off-the-grid in general,” she explained. While she says she is fully over him in terms of desire, the desire to know how he is and what he is up to still nags at her. She says she doesn’t want to see if he’s dating someone new; she just wants to know what he is up to in general.
Compton says that along with the novelty aspect of first love, if the partner is also their first sexual partner, it makes perfect sense why people fixate on it. “It’s very much tied to the biological, like sex and imprinting and all that kind of stuff. If our first love was also our first sexual partner, then what is sex but not the most extreme, intimate form of intimacy and affection?”
He also said that we are trying to compare our future relationships to the first relationship, as this is the only one we have to compare it to, possibly the most idealized one. But there are harms to this fixation, particularly in how the media and culture portray first love.
“One thing the media does is show you this idea of a perfect relationship… The harsh reality is that the one thing movies don’t do well is true communication. I bring this up in the sense of the authenticity of what they’re actually showing. Anyone who’s really been in love knows that flirting with someone is not smooth. It’s really not smooth for most people,” Compton said.
Lori Lefkovitz, a scholar who studies sex and gender in relation to the Bible, said that other forms of media set these expectations thousands of years ago.
“A book like the Bible or Homer or foundation narratives that we have been reading for thousands of years end up setting up a set of expectations for what life is and what is normal based on how things were, but then get reiterated in later stories and sitcoms and advertisements,” Lefkovitz said. She speaks to how these associations create a “rut in the cultural psyche.” Humanity continues to drive in those ruts until we no longer recognize them as made-up ideals.
Johnson noticed this with her concerns around ‘the spark’, wondering if she actually knew what “being in love” would feel like. “The idea that always really, really confused me was what does love actually mean? Like, what are the criteria behind it?” Johnson said. She said that her boyfriend, who had been in a previous relationship, described it as a sense of ease that you have with your partner, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized she was too in-her-head about the specific criteria she had been led to believe.
While love, and “first love” in particular, is fed by the media to the public as consisting of magical, wonderful, life-changing moments that endure forever, it is crucial to consider that there is also an agenda within media that feeds cultural norms, Lefkovitz said. “Think about the heart as a symbol of love. The heart is this bloody, pulsating muscle, and in Shakespearean England, [the symbol of love] was the liver. You loved from your liver.” In other words, “There is nothing natural or self-evident that a heart and love go together,” she said.
Compton says you see the first love of true love when you look back at it. Only when we reflect on our relationships or experiences with the person, whether in a six-month or six-year relationship, will all other relationships be held to that standard. Even if the relationship is not unique, it doesn’t make those consuming feelings of love any less significant than how Langiocola felt over her two-year relationship. And when you are constantly being thwarted by seeing love and first love in the media, who can blame you for fixating on yours?