First Love

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

~ William Shakespeare

Laura writes : I'm remembering my first love as a teenager. I find myself thinking that I should put quotation marks around the word love, as if to say that I realize, being an adult, that it wasn't really love, that it was some adolescent approximation of love, and therefore less worthy.

I stop myself and let myself remember Ted and not insult him or myself or the intensity that we shared by allowing my adult censor to rule the day. Who among us doesn't look with fondness on the rush of excitement, the stir of new sexual feelings, the intense connection that occurs in early relationships?

There is a saying in the increasingly dangerous world of sexually transmitted diseases: When you have sex with someone, you also have sex with everyone she or he has slept with before. I think of this in relationship: When you love someone, you are also loving everyone you have ever loved before.

You carry with you every relationship, every hurt, every joy, every pattern, somewhere embedded in your memory. This makes your later loves heavier, at times, with the voices from the past, but also richer with experience - and it gives to your first love a lightness of being that is one of the greatest wonders of life.

(Excerpts from A Year of Living Consciously by Gay Hendricks)