Life Lessons that The First Love Taught Me

The True First Love

Your first experience with love is as a newborn child. When you are born, your mother gains a sense of love that is irreplaceable as well as your dad, grandparents, and close family members. As you are growing up, you experience discipline where you are taught your rights and wrongs and how to treat people. Your love for people will grow and develop as you are physically and mentally growing. As a kid, I was jolly and grew up spoiled and very loved because I am the only girl my parents had. During the stage of being able to watch as many cartoons and movies as I could, back when homework was colouring circles and doing simple math, I watched princesses meet their prince and fall in love. Growing up with this in mind I always had a specific view of love. You somehow meet someone who is everything you had ever hoped for, you fall in love and have a big fancy wedding. I never liked the “having kids part” so it was not part of my love stories.

My Love Story Is Not a Common One

As I started growing, I knew I liked boys, but I did not know how to pursue those feelings or ideas. I figured that my parents were madly in love, and everyone who was in a relationship or married had to be too. Slowly, I realized this was not the case for many reasons. When you’re a kid, you don't really pay attention to adults. So whenever my parents were arguing it was somewhat secretive so my brother and I wouldn’t hear, or not done around us at all. Looking back things were never really that perfect. My mom was always upset because of my dad. He would leave for a week almost every month to go get drunk with his friends. Throughout the time he would be gone my mom would take my brother and me to many events and fun activities to distract us from our reality. My dad is not a bad man, and he never left us without what we needed. And through all of this, I thought they were still happy because when he did come back home they will still lay in bed together at night.

As I start my story to my first love, I want to say that I thought I knew absolutely everything about loving someone by the age of fourteen. Clearly I knew nothing, and I still have so much to learn about what it is like to actually love someone. Social media really influenced my thought process on how relationships were supposed to be and what a man should offer to a woman, even though I never really believed in gender roles. Love to me was equal, and did not revolve around who had to do what in the relationship.

As I start my sophomore year of high school, my best friend who was a boy had a friend that I found really cute. We eventually started speaking, consistently texting each other about our days, and how much we wanted to meet. His name was Eric, Eric Almonte. He was very sweet, funny and loving, or so I thought before we were actually in a relationship. When we began seeing each other, we had a lot of fun. We always ate food together and we genuinely enjoyed each others company. This lasted for about the first few months before the arguing started and the jealousy arose. He would ask me, about people I had been friends with for such a long time. “Why are you always hanging out with those guys?” Quickly after that, the trust we had for each other started to go away, and we would constantly question whether or not we truly loved each other. The arguments consisted of me feeling undervalued or unappreciated. After a certain time, rumours of other girls being involved in his love life started to spread, making me look clueless in front of other people. His actions showed his lack of respect towards me because I was with someone who did not respect me and my values. It took some time to completely cut Eric out of my life, first involving not seeing him any more, deleting him off of social media and then blocking his number to completely move on. This relationship genuinely taught me that some people are not meant to be together, and there are certain situations put on one’s path to truly see what deserves your time and attention. Being in a relationship that is toxic can cause a lot of mental distraction and emotional pain.

As I continued my way out of that relationship, I took a break from looking for a relationship for a while. I was focused on my grades and good friendships. Self-love was a big part of my healing process, and I was able to learn my worth. Things that I would’ve never thought was needed to bring attention to such as how much I enjoy writing my emotions, my love for music, singing, and the big heart I obtain for others. Throughout this time, I had people to talk to, but I did not want anything serious with any of them because I did not want a relationship.

The reality of love is being aware of what can happen throughout that relationship. Realizing signs at an early stage, to determine the damage your partner is capable of. According to “How To Tell If You’re In An Emotionally Abusive Relationship” by an organization called One Love, talks about the complicated reality of some relationships, and how to recognize what your partners' actions consist of. Following the detailed steps of “ A Perfect Start, Picking up Speed, No Space Allowed, Irrational Jealousy, Unpredictable Affection, Shifting the Blame, Put-Downs, Putting on an Act and The Guilt Trip.” Throughout the article, the author claims that if you start seeing these issues, they are warning signs within your relationship. As I was reading this, it brought me back to my relationships where everything being claimed actually happened. It was a tough awakening for me because as I kept experiencing the same things I started to believe it was normal to feel unhappy and that love was supposed to consistently hurt.

Conclusion

It’s amazing how much you realize what a person does to you when you are no longer with them. As I’m becoming older and wiser I've learned that we cannot obtain a single story about anything in life. We cannot judge what we do not know until we go through it. Let’s say I come across someone who brings me joy and has a personality that I like to be around: I will instead of jumping into a relationship get to know the person and their habits. That way, I truly know if this person is worth having around. Not everything needs to involve intimacy, instead, everything should revolve around being healthy. Having a single story about things restrains you from seeing the greater picture. Love is a beautiful thing and everyone should experience it, but knowing it’s bad side will cause people to double think who is worth putting in the time for.

Work Cited

• “How To Tell If You're In An Emotionally Abusive Relationship.” One Love Foundation, 21 Aug. 2019, https://www.joinonelove.org/learn/emotional_abuse/.