Do You Ever Get Over Your First Love?

On falling in love, falling out, everything in between, and - shit I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.

Nuclear radioactive half-life is the time it takes for the number of nuclei of an isotope in a sample to halve. Half life is crucial in determining its danger. If a radioactive substance has a very long half-life, we know it will remain radioactive for a very long time. The longer it remains radioactive, the more dangerous it will be.

My Mum said to me once after a breakup that it takes half the time of your relationship to get over the person. I remember looking at my phone calendar and thinking great, only three years to go.

Always an overachiever, I was determined to speed up the process. I would try therapy. I would write it all out start to finish. I would date other people. I would make new friends. I would stay in the same city. I would move. I would get a new job. I would dye my hair blonde. I would try everything to create an entirely new person. It starts out as this big thumping heartbeat you hear all the time, throbbing and consuming. Then, it burns into tinnitus - only really there when you can’t sleep at night.

Three years later, I’m sitting with my friend when she asks me if you ever get over your first love.

“Of course!” I say instinctively. “It just takes time.”

I tried to remember the feeling of heartbreak, of yearning, of missing someone. But I can’t put my finger on it. I know it happened, but I can’t make myself remember that it hurt. It feels almost trivial all these years later, how did something so naive and young make me feel so much pain? Of course it wouldn’t last forever, it seems obvious now. Maybe my Mum was right.

It is often said that women, more so than men, forget pain easier. Otherwise, the fate of humankind would be at stake. Who would have another baby after the pain of childbirth? Who would love again after loss?

I think as the ivy grows over your heart and your ribcage is sewn back up; it is in our nature to fall in love again and again. But for some, exes become this mythic thing we hold to such a high regard. Our foundation for everything, our comparison to new partners, the thing that holds us back.

In our dreams, we apparently can’t think of new faces so we imagine it’s someone we’ve already seen before; I think yearning is like this too. People miss their exes because they can’t possibly imagine someone loving them again. A first love is something like God, you only return to it late at night when you’ve lost all faith. Though that feels blasphemous to write, I believe it’s because you crave something bigger than something you’ve ever had from another human being; it’s acceptance, it’s unconditional, it’s mythic. Here lies proof this woman was once loveable.

Nostalgia is a killer, and our exes are no exemption. People remember their first loves like an endless summer at seventeen. Soft words and sun kissed skin; stolen love against your parents wishes that drifts into adulthood and you remember it fondly. You love each other with the reckless abandon of people that have never been hurt before. You might find yourself dreaming of the past because it’s a comfort to you even if you know it’s bad. When you really think about it, it was full of bad communication and silly arguments; you were ill-equipped to make it last into your late twenties. It’s just about wanting more for yourself, daring to dream bigger than you’ve ever had before. And believing you deserve it.

You can’t find someone new to paint over the pain from it, you can’t go out all the time, you can’t convince yourself you hate them, you just have to be uncomfortable for a while and each day you’ll think of them less, and one day you will wake up and the ache in your chest will be gone. Maybe we need to reframe heartbreak in our twenties, how lucky am I to have loved and to have paid the price with loss. Once created, love has to go somewhere after all. (Excerpt from my essay ‘Merry Christmas Please Don’t Call’)

What happens to love after it burns to loss?

I’m a big believer in love always comes back. As the saying goes, ‘never in the same person, but it always comes back’. The best life advice I’ve ever received was to live ‘from love, not for love’. Love is energy and it never truly disappears, because you made it. It belongs to you.

“And when I turned to face grief, I saw that it was love just in a heavy coat.”

Your first real love story was the one that happened when you were born. It was when you took your first steps and said Mum for the first time. It was when you came home tired but brushed your teeth anyway. When you get good news and you can’t stop smiling because you’re proud of yourself. It’s when you’re sad and you cared for yourself regardless. All of the things we’re promised our first love will be; unconditional and accepting - it doesn’t need to be mythical. Your first love and your longest love will always be yourself.

Your greatest love stories are still on their way. You are love itself, you’re just waiting for someone to share it with again.

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.