Why you don't marry your first love...

I was recently speaking with my first love, who has become a dear friend. We were discussing our children, and while talking about his son and his first love, I found myself saying, “Don’t worry, he’s smart enough not to marry his first love, so he will be fine.” For some reason, I couldn’t get that out of my head while driving to work. It probably stuck in my head because I was saying to my first love that it's stupid to marry your first love, and I found that odd.  

It always made sense to me that you don’t marry your first love, even though I know some people do and have very successful marriage. But, I never took the time to determine why that made sense to me. This is what I came up with for why you don’t marry your first love:

You learn something from each relationship, so if you only have one, you miss out on many lessons. From your first love, you learn to be vulnerable. This is a very important lesson.  After your first love, you learn how to deal with relationships ending. This is a valuable lesson as well, because any relationship (friendships, romantic relationships, business relationship, etc.), can come to an end, and knowing how to get through that ending is an important skill to have. And then you get back on the horse, and the relationships following your first love teach you:

-           to trust, and learn when not to trust

-          to relax and have fun

-          to be supportive and to allow someone to be supportive for you

-           to have passion and to learn the difference between passion and love

-           to forgive and learn when to forget

-          and finally, to commit

I know a lot of this can be learned from your first love, but I think it’s hard to learn all of that from one person. I know I didn't. And, you also learn a very valuable lesson when you are between relationships. You learn who you are when you’re not in a relationship. Without that time alone, you can end up become what the other person wants you to be, rather than who you want to be.

And, my final thought on not marrying your first love…is that if you did marry your first love, you would never randomly meet your true love one day at the mall. J