3 Surprising Lessons I’ve Learned from Falling in Love First Time
What is the key to a person’s heart, from my experience and perspectives?
Everybody thinks love is beautiful. It’s romanticized in movies, acted out in plays, written about in books, and memorialized in poems, to mention a few. Every old couple you meet holding hands on the street will tell you a beautiful and captivating story of how they met many years ago and fell in love, just like magic.
Even more captivating is their boundless love, which has kept them together all these years. These stories melt your heart like ice cream in the California sun. Indeed, they are beautiful and lovely.
While these feelings are widespread, I don’t fall for the allure of love. I also don’t buy into the ‘love is in the air’ fairytales. Being inclined towards science, you can guess my stance on Romeo and Juliet — good luck deciphering it.
Don’t get me wrong. I have been in beautiful relationships in which we respected each other, valued each other, and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. But fall in love? — this is like the holy grail; it’s much talked about but has never been found.
An Overview of Attempts to Explain Love
As magical as love sounds, it can be explained by biology and chemical reactions. Scientists say that when we feel love, it is dopamine and oxytocin playing games on us.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a huge role in the brain’s reward centre. When we do things that we like, such as eat, have sex, play games, or even use drugs, our brain releases a high level of dopamine, which makes us feel good.
Our brain also releases a high level of dopamine when we are in love, which makes love pleasurable, similar to the euphoria people get from taking hard drugs or alcohol. Oxytocin — another neurotransmitter active when we feel love — makes us feel safer, calmer, and more secure with the people we love.
Love has also been the subject of philosophical discourse. Philosophers from Bertrand Russel to Nietzsche all had things to say about love and romance. I also dabbled in philosophy.
As any philosopher who is worth their salt would do, I would rationalize love, hoping to find a logical and perfect explanation for why I didn’t believe in it and why I had a problem with people who would say “I love you” at the drop of a heart.
There are many reasons why it was convenient for me not to believe in love. Scientific studies have shown that love makes us act dumb. When we are attracted to someone, the regions of our brain responsible for critical thinking and rational behaviour are turned off, and we do things that aren’t too logical.
Remember Romeo and Juliet? In my mind, I didn’t want to be Romeo and Juliet; I didn’t want the logical philosopher in me to believe in something that makes me act dumb.
And then I met her. The night I met her, she was wearing a pink jumpsuit emblazoned with black poker dots. We hit it off and danced till we were both sweaty.
The night ended as unremarkably as it had begun. Two strangers who had been brought together by fate and chance, we went our separate ways without saying goodbye. We didn’t even so much as exchange numbers or make follow-up plans.
Little did I know that I had met the woman, the one who would steal my heart away and make the rational philosopher and scientist in me disappear. This pink-jumpsuit-wearing stranger has made me question everything I thought I knew about love.
As a new convert to the gospel of heart and love, I have a few lessons that are worth sharing with anybody out there who is a skeptic about love or just to anybody who cares to listen. These are my thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which might or might not resonate with some.
Lesson 1: You don’t have to believe it to experience it.
I grew up in a religious family. My family would pray together every day and go to church at least three times every week. Whenever we were in any kind of need, we would pray to God and believe him for a miracle.
Early in life, I learned this important lesson: miracles don’t work unless you believe. Even Jesus said so in the Bible. Belief in miracles is an essential ingredient to experiencing a miracle.
Not so in love. Matters of the heart are sometimes irrational and sometimes unpredictable. The heart has a knack for not always following set-down rules or logic. I have always been vocal about what I think about love, to friends, to family, to anyone who would care to listen.
Sure, I loved the stories, and I could appreciate why people had to believe in something as magical as love. For some people, love brings meaning to their lives. For others, love makes life more beautiful.
But I didn’t subscribe to any of that gibberish. Talk about love to me, and you would be sounding like a salesman trying to sell me snake oil in 2023 or a real estate agent trying so desperately to sell me a castle in the sky.
Following the law of miracles, it wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love. How can I fall in love when the concept of love seemed illogical and mistaken to me? Instead, this is how it was meant to go:
I would meet the woman in the pink jumpsuit, and we would dance all night, hold hands, and dance some more. Maybe if we both enjoyed the night, then we would meet some other day on a date. Somewhere along the line, we might have sex. In the event that we enjoy each other’s company so much, we would decide to be together. As a couple, we should share our lives, be kind, support each other, eat together, laugh together, learn together, and share lots of amazing moments and experiences.
But to fall in love? Well, there is only a 0.000001% chance of that in my scientific head — what a rarity!
Life is beautiful and unpredictable in many different ways. Amid all the chaos in our present world, real love remains pure and peaceful. You should keep an open heart when you meet a new person — a potential new partner.
Letting go of past experiences, prejudices, or any preconceived notions you might have creates enough room in your heart for a new and unpredictable experience.
Some of the prejudices people have are genuine. A painful experience with an ex-lover might have shattered all your hopes about love. Or maybe seeing your friend heartbroken and depressed after a failed love adventure was the deal breaker for you.
Or maybe you had a friend in what you thought was a perfect relationship until you had to be a de-facto therapist for your friend to complain about how terrible their partner was.
Whatever the reasons for your prejudices, you’d have to keep them at the door when you meet your pink jumpsuit-wearing lady. It is important to remember that every day is a new chance to start afresh. That’s the only way to give love a chance.
Lesson 2: It is okay if you can’t describe what you feel.
To rationalize love, you must create plausible theories to explain the phenomenon. Any meaningful theory has to be convenient enough to use as an answer when someone asks, ‘Why don’t you believe in love?’
Also, the theory has to be articulate enough to sound logical. So, like a true philosopher, I formed a theory. For me, what people call love could be broken down into different emotional and mental states. Like every other emotion, such as anger, fear, joy, or surprise, love is simply the result of chemical reactions in our brains.
We cannot define love. When a person says ‘I love him/her’, what do they mean? If this person is referring to their romantic partner, then usually they have spent a lot of time with this person. They share the same interests, do activities together, and are an active part of each others’ lives.
Your partner would have seen the best and worst of you and has been there when you were at your most vulnerable. Your partner is someone who understands and with whom you share a bond of trust.
Of course, spending a lot of time with a person with whom you share similar interests, experiences, and even your life activates a lot of emotional and mental states.
A study published in Psychology Science shows that “when we share experiences with people, we experience these experiences as more intense. When it’s the person you are attracted to, you begin to feel comfortable in their presence; the trust you have for them drives you to seek out their opinion when you need advice and confide in them when you feel vulnerable.”
All the time you spend together leads to a sense of genuine intimacy and a growing affection. You feel a sense of responsibility toward their happiness and well-being; you become passionate about them. Because your partner treats you nicely and respectfully, you feel cherished.
There are a thousand and one different words to describe the emotional states of a person who says they are in love: affection, intimacy, acceptance, autonomy, security, trust, empathy, connection, to mention but a few. The huge mistake people make is thinking that all these feelings are the feeling of being in love. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It is possible to have a relationship in which you have these same feelings, but you don’t describe yourself as being in love. Yes, I am saying as long as you can have these same emotional states in a relationship in which you are not in love, then the mere presence of these emotional states is not equivalent to being in love.
Everything changed when I met the woman in the pink jumpsuit. Since I met her, I’ve felt things that I couldn’t fully explain, feelings that I haven’t had before.
Sure, there is compassion, affection, empathy, acceptance, and all of that. But in addition to these, there is something extra that cannot be aptly described with words — perhaps it is a feeling of the proverbial butterfly in the stomach.
What you feel is unique to you. We have words to help us articulate how we feel, but words have their limitations.
Words often fall short in capturing the depth and breadth of human emotions, except in the hands of masterful poets like Shakespeare or novelists like Dostoyevsky.
Authentic and profound emotions often defy description — a sign of their depth and sincerity. The inability to articulate such feelings signifies that your partner leads you to emotional peaks, evoking sensations you’ve never experienced with anyone else.
When love happens to you, it is okay if it feels too good to be put into words.
Lesson 3: Staying in love requires constant work and compromise
“Love doesn’t cost a thing” is a widespread quote across social media. But whoever made that statement was lying through their teeth.
The same goes for whoever said love is blind. Contrary to what you have learned from popular culture, love is quite expensive and is definitely not blind — at least not fully.
The cost of love extends far beyond financial aspects — it encompasses physical, emotional, and psychological investments. It demands time, attention, resources, energy, and freedom, creating a vast landscape of sacrifices akin to an economist’s paradise of missed opportunities and concealed expenditures.
Falling in love is one thing, but to stay in love requires that you make a constant effort to service your relationship in a way that increases or deepens the bonds you share with your partner.
You can’t rest on your laurels after or take your eyes off the ball. Having a healthy relationship requires that you invest in your relationship.
Some of the investments include being kind to each other, making an effort to share activities and create memories together, giving each other special moments, and listening and being attentive to your partners’ concerns and needs, to mention but a few.
It is important to make your partner feel special every day. This requires you to be as thoughtful as you are hardworking.
Being in love and making it work also requires a lot of compromise. You must remember that you are a different person from your partner. You grew up in different families and are from different backgrounds. Maybe you also have different personalities.
It is expected that your wants, needs, dreams, and expectations will be different. For your relationship to succeed, you and your partner would have to negotiate your differences in a healthy way and arrive at a concession that is acceptable to both parties. This is another cost of being in love.
A wise man once said that keeping your partner requires as much effort as it took to get them. Cheer up. There is some good news!
The good news is that when you love someone, the effort you put in, and the energy you expend in maintaining your relationship does not feel like work.
When two people love each other, everything they do to keep that love is part of a pleasurable and fulfilling experience, an experience that makes everybody better for it.
Final Thoughts
The art and science of love is complicated. The most brilliant scientists, philosophers, and artists — people who you would assume should have all the answers — sometimes can’t explain why they fall in love with it, and it is hard. Emily Dickinson put it aptly when she wrote, “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
There are no hard and fast rules about falling, nor should there be. The whole purpose is to enjoy the experience.
If you are lucky, your journey here will last about nine-odd decades. While you live, you deserve to experience all the happiness that life has to offer, and what greater happiness is there than love?
According to George Sans, “There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”
Here are a few takeaway points from my story.
You deserve beauty; you deserve happiness; you deserve love. Love is beautiful. Nobody really understands love. Science has given us a good explanation for how love works.
But the why seems to escape even the best scientific explanation. Scientists also say that love makes us do dumb things. The irony is that having this knowledge does not preclude even the smartest people from doing dumb stuff when they are in love.
Love is unpredictable. You don’t go around looking for love. Sometimes it just comes to you when you least expect it.
Always have an open heart. You can never be quite sure where you’ll find it — or with whom. The best policy is to go into every relationship with an open mind, free from prejudices.
Thank you for reading my love story. I wish you a lovely life.
