Monday, January 19, 2009

First Love and Marriage

The Other McCain has a short post up about this article on how first love can ruin future relationships.

Sociologists found that the euphoria of young love can become an unrealistic benchmark against which all future romances are judged.

According to the report, the best way to ensure long-term happiness in a relationship is not to fixate on how you fell head over heels the first time.

Those who take a more pragmatic view of what they need from a relationship rather than striving to recreate the intense passion they once shared with an old flame are more likely to have successful long-term partneship, it argues.

Young love is different from later romances. For one thing, once you've been in love, you start having an expectation about what love should be like and whether your current situation fits that model.

I suspect that this experience also affects who gets married, who stays married, and why. If you watch too much TV as a teenager and read too many sappy romance novels, you come away with a wholy unrealistic view of what marriage is like, which is why so many people enter their 20s looking for their "one true love" and won't settle for anything less than perfection.

Let's get something straight. Perfection is a great goal, and we'd all like to attain it. But there are plenty of great guys and gals who don't get married because they keep waiting for someone who likes eating cold pizza in the morning just like they do. It doesn't seem to occur to them that you can develop a taste for cold pizza because you like the company.

And that really is the point: lasting relationships grow and people adapt to each other over time. You learn to deal with your spouse's flaws, which helps you enjoy their better qualities.

Which leads back to dwelling on first love. I remember my first love, but I remember all of him, not just the fun stuff. There are reasons you aren't still with that first love, and perhaps you need to keep that in mind when you start measuring all others to that one.