If You Can't Be Someone's First Love, Make Sure You're Someone's Last

Just like I’d never sleep with a virgin because I know I wouldn’t enjoy the sex, I wouldn’t want to be someone’s first love because she, likewise, has too much to learn.

With love, just as with everything else intelligent, there’s a learning curve. Contrary to popular belief, you aren’t born knowing how to love properly.

It isn’t an innate quality, and yes, it is possible to do it wrong.

What most people fail to realize is when we first experience romantic love, it’s an entirely selfish act -- a selfish act disguised as an entirely selfless one. This is a huge problem.

What ends up happening is all that extra fluff we ourselves conjure up inevitably dissipates, leaving us feeling more egocentric than before we fell in love.

As the excitement fades, settling into a calmer state of flux, we begin to feel as if the love is fading. And, in a large sense, we’re right.

When we love for the first time, we don’t understand how to love. We equate excitement with love.

We confuse our selfishness for complete selflessness -- and it catches up with us.

Not only should you not worry about being someone’s first love, I’d highly recommend you avoid it altogether.

The truth is first loves -- although the most intense and memorable -- are also the least likely to succeed and most likely to cause you incredible emotional pain.

You have to learn how to be selfless.

To love is to embrace a certain level of selflessness. Doing so successfully is much harder than most people think.

There is so much rhetoric surrounding the concept of love, telling us how seamless, effervescent and eternal it is that many individuals get tricked into believing just that.

Love is nothing more than an idea, albeit an idea capable of soliciting an intense emotional response. Being selfless isn’t an idea; it’s a decision.

No one is selfless by nature because selflessness is literally against our nature.

It takes time to learn to become more selfless -- not entirely selfless but more selfless. Most importantly, it’s important to understand where to draw the line.

There are psychological implications to selflessness, and giving too much of ourselves to any single individual always ends up doing more harm than good.

The only way to get a feel of the appropriate balance is through trial and error.

You have to understand yourself psychologically and emotionally in order to make a relationship last.

Love changes lives because it catches people off guard.

No matter what you’ve been told about love or what you think you know about love until you’ve actually fallen in love, you can’t possibly understand it.

It’s like trying to describe the experience of the color blue to a blind person.

Unfortunately, being in love alone is not enough to fully understand love.

The truth is you can’t understand love until you understand the hole it leaves once it’s lost. Human beings learn by trial and error, by a system of rewards and punishments

Attaining knowledge is largely a conditioning process. While the wiser of us have learned to learn from all the good, it’s only because we’ve already experienced enough bad to imagine how the lack thereof would feel.

In other words, even the most experienced and seasoned of individuals only know not to mess with fire because they’ve already gotten burned.

The same goes for love -- unless you understand how it feels to have lost it, you’ll never understand how to appreciate.

For this reason, being someone’s first love is not desirable. Those who have never been in love don’t understand themselves well enough to be capable of maintaining a healthy loving relationship.

First loves usually end up being incredibly painful reality checks.

For both of those involved, I’m afraid. It’s even worse if you’ve been in love before, learned to understand the beast a bit better only to have fallen for someone who has yet to pop that emotional cherry.

For first-timers, the experience is an awfully confusing one. The obsession they had is dwindling, and they aren’t sure where to find solid ground to stand on.

Everything is changing at a rapid pace, and understanding what you’re feeling is very difficult.

It’s even worse for those who have already loved before because they can’t do anything more than just stand there and watch as the people they love allow the love they share to fade into dust.

They know there is nothing they can do because love is a choice only the individual him or herself can choose to accept as his or her reality. You can’t force or trick someone into loving you.

It’s a reality check for both individuals involved; the newbie lover begins to distinguish the difference between the emotions he or she feels and what it actually means to love while the seasoned lover is forced to accept that.

When it comes to life and love, things are sometimes completely out of your control.

Accepting both of these truths isn’t easy. When we love, we enjoy it as much as we do because we feel it’s out of our control.

We feel the world is sending us a sign, aligning the stars just for us when, in fact, the exact opposite is true.

Love is not entirely, but almost entirely, in our control while someone else loving us, on the other hand, is out of our hands entirely. Life will often prove you wrong when being right means the most to you.

Life will disappoint, but that doesn’t mean you should allow yourself to dwell in disappointment.

There is always another chance for love, and as long as you don’t give up, you’ll find that lasting and everlasting love.

It almost certainly won’t be your first, but why do you need it to be?

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