Do You Always Have Feelings For Your First Love?

Your first love is a very powerful experience. It’s the first time you open your heart up to another person and become vulnerable around him or her. It’s also the first time you experience an addictive dose of love hormones and get attached to someone you like.

This is why you will always remember the first time you kissed, the euphoria you went through when you were falling in love, and the way you felt when you were intimate with your ex. You won’t forget those moments as they were hailed as a milestone in your romantic life and made a very strong emotional impression on you.

As you know, there is only one first love—and you remember that first love more vividly than your second or third love. You especially remember it if you were young, insecure, anxious, depressed, and highly emotional at that time. And that’s because emotions are what make us remember things, people, and experiences. They make us attached to them and often even force us to crave them when our lives slow down and become less exciting and fulfilling.

How you feel about your first love today really depends on four factors.

1. How you perceived yourself and how emotionally strong you were back then.
2. How the relationship made you feel.
3. How much time has passed since the breakup.
4. And how good your life is today.

Here’s an example. If the relationship with your first love was very loving or conversely, extremely argumentative and unhealthy, you most likely anchored strong emotions to your brain and now remember those times. You remember the strong feelings they made you feel and as a result, think about them from time to time. You especially think about them when your life doesn’t go the way you want it to.

But if your self-esteem and emotional health were quite decent and your first love was just a two-month high school dating experience that ended on a good note, then you probably haven’t created associations strong enough to remember your first love and miss him or her. You just moved on from this person and possibly even met someone new who became your next most important person.

If this is what happened, you probably haven’t and won’t become nostalgic about your first love. You won’t have a reason to obsess about him or her because you’ve created stronger and better memories and emotions on your own or with someone new.

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll always remember your first love because you can’t just erase a person you dated from your memory. But you probably won’t miss this person and redevelop feelings for him or her. Not unless this person made a strong emotional impression on you.

People who have strong feelings for their first love usually crave that person not because that person is the best for them but because they don’t take the time to negate their thoughts and feelings. Instead of leaving the past in the past, they ponder about it excessively and become obsessed with acquiring their first love’s approval.

This is how they develop strong unhealthy feelings for their ex and think that the person they’re meant to be with is their first love.

The topic of this post is if you always have feelings for your first love. We’ll talk about when you’re most likely going to have feelings for your first love and when you won’t associate any feelings with him or her at all.

Do you always have feelings for your first love?

It’s perfectly normal to remember your first love. We all think about our crushes and exes now and then and wonder what they’re up to. But just because we remember them doesn’t mean that we have feelings for them and want them back.

All it means is that they’ve been on our minds for a while and that we’re curious about where their lives have taken them.

It becomes a concern only when we have expectations of our first love because that’s when we expect him or her to have feelings for us too. We set our hopes on that person and wish that he or she wants the same thing we want.

And that can be very dangerous for us.

If our ex wants to get back together, our ex absorbs our pain, anxiety, or fears and triggers another love stage. But if he or she doesn’t want us back, we suffer from rejection and feel twice as anxious.

This is why you mustn’t try to get back with an ex who dumped you. The possibilities of your dumper ex having feelings for you aren’t as high as they are for you as a dumpee.

You must remember that as a dumpee, you got abandoned and hurt—and will most likely remember your first love experience a lot more strongly than your ex will. It’s just the way it is. The one who suffers the most analyzes the breakup the most, blames himself or herself, and feels a lot of regrets.

He or she gets stuck in the past whereas the other person feels elated and focuses on the present moment.

That’s why how you feel about your first love strongly depends on:

• your emotional health, self-perception, and emotional strength
• the things you did to get over your ex (forgive yourself and your ex, stop communicating with your ex, rebuild your confidence and self-esteem)
• the romantic relationships you’ve been in and the success you’ve had with them
• the lessons you’ve learned and the shortcomings you’ve improved
• the friends you’ve made and the people you’ve met since your ex
• and the hobbies, ambitions, and purposes you’ve discovered in this world

The more you’ve developed yourself after the breakup and the more you’ve learned about yourself and others, the less likely it is that you’ll miss your first love. If you’ve found your meaning and comfort in this world, you simply won’t miss the past because you’ve created a more fulfilling present and plans for the future.

So to answer the question, “Do you always have feelings for your first love,” the answer that applies to most people reading this is no. Most people get over their first love and date people who make them feel stronger emotions. Their new partners keep them in the present moment and allow them to emotionally distance themselves from their exes.

The problem arises only when people fail to create something for themselves – when they don’t improve and get themselves in trouble. That’s when they become nostalgic about the past and crave their exes even if their exes were emotionally or verbally abusive to them.

The picture below depicts a few instances that could cause you to feel that you still love your first love.

Do you ever stop missing your first love?

If you just got dumped by your first love, you obviously still miss that person like crazy. You desire his or her presence, affection, love, smell, and everything this person gave to you on a daily basis. You’re obsessed and need to find a way to break your obsession so you can fall back in love with yourself.

That is your only job as a dumpee because your ex has hurt your ego and self-esteem, triggered your separation anxiety, and hurt you more than anyone’s ever hurt you before.

It’s the first time you were introduced to breakup pain, and you probably wish that you weren’t. If you could, you’d prefer to stay in a relationship with your first love and continue to stay in love.

But since your relationship didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped it would, you now need to gather your strength and persevere. You need to understand that the breakup happened for a reason and that there’s a way you can greatly benefit from it.

You’re probably in too much pain to see how you can gain anything from your breakup, but trust me that you can and that you might someday even prefer the benefits of the breakup to the benefits of the relationship.

But for that to happen, you’ll need a lot of self-awareness, strength, and blind faith.

I won’t go into too much detail, but the first breakup can help you regain your identity (if you got too close to your ex), help you improve your flaws, increase your self-awareness and emotional intelligence, and give your next relationship the directions it needs to function better.

You don’t want to hear this right now because you’re hurting and most likely still extremely interested in getting back with your ex, but you need to know that every failed relationship is an opportunity for the next relationship to be better and stronger.

Every time a relationship breaks, it’s a blessing in disguise because you get a chance to identify your shortcomings, improve yourself, and do better next time. So work on yourself now that you feel inspired to grow and keep in mind that you won’t always feel as anxious as you do right now.

If you work on yourself and stay busy, you’ll soon develop immunity to pain and see that your first love doesn’t have to be your last love. He or she can be someone you needed to be with to learn, improve, and strengthen yourself.

Specific situations that cause you to miss your first love

Separation anxiety is the biggest incentive for missing your first love. But that’s only true if the breakup occurred recently.

If you got over your first love already and then started missing him or her, then something else is making you reminisce. Something is causing you to reflect on the past and making you miss the person you used to love and feel loved by.

And that something is directly connected to your current situation (to how happy you are). The sadder you are, the more likely it is that you crave your first love because you’re looking through rose-tinted glasses and think that you had better emotional support when you were with your first love.

You think that your ex loved you and helped you with your emotional struggles even if that may not be true.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a few specific situations that may have triggered your feelings for your ex, you need to know that it’s the bad things that trigger nostalgia. Bad experiences force us to look for backup plans that could make our problems go away.

It’s possible you keep missing your first love because you:

• rebounded with someone or just got out of a (new) relationship
• got fired
• dreamed about your ex
• stalked your ex online and saw something you weren’t meant to see
• bumped into your ex
• lost friends and feel lonely
• got reminded of your ex and became nostalgic
• learned that your ex is getting married
• still talk to your first love and think that he or she is happy (possibly with someone else) while you’re not
• compare your life before to life now

If you’d taken the time to improve all areas of your life (education, work, finances, emotional/physical health, etc), you wouldn’t be missing your first love many months or years after the breakup. You’d have created a life where you wouldn’t think that your first love is the best person you should settle down with.

That’s why you already know what you must focus on from now on. You must find your reason for craving your first love so you can fall back in love with yourself and move forward with your life. Once you’ve done that, you’ll feel self-fulfilled and realize that your first love was someone you were supposed to be with only temporarily – so you could learn some valuable lessons.

The truth is that there is no such thing as “the one and only.” That’s what movies and fairy tales want us to believe. We can be happy with lots of people. The question it all comes down to is who do we want to build a future with? Is it with someone who quit on us or with someone new who’s a fighter and doesn’t think poorly of us?

Everyone knows it’s easier to start fresh. But because their ex has caused them pain, they want to reconcile with their ex and obtain their lost power and recognition. They want to feel important, so they think that their ex is the person they’re supposed to be with.

Their ex, however, isn’t their most ideal partner. When a couple breaks up, it breaks up because they fail to communicate their differences to each other. Yes, they can learn to communicate better and give their broken relationship another shot, but they can do that only when the quitter (the dumper) is willing to do that.

He or she is the one who called it quits, and must therefore be the one who comes back and apologizes.

Reconciliations usually don’t happen on the dumpee’s terms because the dumpee turns into a beggar and appears extremely unattractive. They occur when the dumper suffers, (or rarely, reflects without suffering) and comes back to apologize and commit.

Many dumpees think their first love is their best option

Breakups are heart-breaking. But when we get broken up with for the first time, we have no idea what to expect and what to do. We feel disoriented and think that the quickest way to stop hurting is to get back with our ex.

Although that is true, we tend to forget that getting back with our first love isn’t always the smartest idea.

In fact, it seldom is because we have a lot of work to do on ourselves The breakup is a sign that something went wrong in the relationship and that reconciling with our ex won’t magically fix the problem. It will ignore it and most likely cause another breakup later down the road when that problem returns.

That’s why rushing back into a relationship is the biggest mistake a broken couple can make. They should first get over each other and then think about whether they are best suited for each other. Emotional distance can help them see their relationship from a clearer perspective.

It can help them see that they both have flaws they need to work on and that they’re equally responsible for the breakup.

The dumpee usually realizes this a few weeks into the breakup. But the dumper tends to have an epiphany when he or she dates someone new and encounters a lot of difficulties, pain, and anxiety. That’s when the dumper reflects and realizes that he or she may have taken the relationship for granted.

So if you’re still hurting over the loss of your relationship, distance yourself from the cause of the problem and invest in yourself. Improve your flaws and find something or someone else to spend time with. That should be enough to stop loving your first love.

If it’s not enough, then sign up for therapy and learn what exactly it is that you crave and can’t get over. When you find the culprit, you’ll stop missing your first love very quickly.

Do you think you always have feelings for your first love? What kind of thoughts and feelings do you associate with your first love? Post your comment below this post.

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Zan

My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.