Do You Ever Get Over Your First Love?

Maybe it was your high school sweetheart.

Or that special person you met in your twenties. Maybe you didn’t meet them until you were a little older. However it happened, most of us have a first love. 

Sometimes we marry our first love (like some of my high school friends did). More often than not, though, our romance with our first love ends somehow. Life circumstances get in the way. We grow up and grow apart. 

But do we ever get over them?

Pop culture is filled with songs that suggest we never really do. In his song “Every Now and Then”, Garth Brooks sings:

The other day I saw a car like you used to drive

I got a funny feeling down deep inside

And for the briefest moment I felt a smile again

Yes I do think about you

Every now and then

It’s natural to look back wistfully sometimes, to feel that sweet pang of nostalgia when we recall the time we went to a homecoming dance or drove along the coast together or had a stupid fight. 

First loves are usually intense, often because we’re young when they happen, and they create strong associations. Hearing a song, running into an old mutual friend, or the smell of a cologne can take you back. 

So do we ever really get over them?

The answer is yes. 

Or rather, we should get over them if we are growing as healthy human beings. If we stay stuck in the past, we’re not realizing our full potential. We’ve all seen it happen to people: life moves on, they get older, but emotionally they’re stuck at the same age as when they experienced their first love. That’s not healthy for anybody.

Ideally, we should learn from the experiences, both good and bad, of our first love. We can feel grateful for those days, or a little twinge of regret at what we might have done differently. That’s natural. But we shouldn’t want to go back.

As healthy humans, we’re meant to keep growing and maturing, emotionally and in the way we love.

The romanticization of a first love can even be dangerous. People who are struggling in their marriages sometimes start to think back fondly to their first love. Too fondly.

Everything seemed simpler and happier then, and they long to return to a better time. What they don’t realize is that they’re only in love with a memory, usually a highly idealized one. But that time is over and is not meant to be revisited.

I had a first love in high school.

It was your typical two-year, whirlwind, trying-to-figure-it-all-out, awkward, exhilarating affair.

It ended my senior year. A decade later, I got married. My wife and I loved each other, even if we married too hastily and made mistakes. We divorced seven years later and had the marriage annulled. 

Flash forward almost another decade. I met, dated, and fell in love with a new woman. Now we’re married. All this taught me something I wrote in my divorce memoir but didn’t truly realize until it played out in my life:

We humans are resilient creatures. We’re made to love, yes. But we’re also made to bounce back from failed love. We’re made to keep loving, to keep hoping, to keep growing. We fall, but we keep falling forward.

All this gets to the heart of what love really is. 

“First loves” are usually mixed up heavily with eros, the sensual and emotional form of love that’s strong on feelings.

Eros is a great thing. But we’re not meant to stop there.

We are all called to progress into agape, the selfless form of love that wants the best for others. That’s the kind of love God shows each of us, and the kind of love we continually try to develop and practice.

So it is possible, then, to still love our “first love.” But as we move on in life, we love them in a different way, one that’s appropriate to where we are now in life. We wish the best for them, pray for them, and entrust them to God.

As always, we look to Jesus for insight. The Bible says Jesus was a child once, of course, but he didn’t stay stuck there. “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). We must grow and become strong, filled with wisdom. 

We must move beyond the love of poignant pop songs and scrapbook memories into the kind of love God desires for us.

First love is a good thing. But if we’re growing as God intends, a first love shouldn’t be our last.