If there is one thing I have learnt in the course of the past few years, it is that love is spectacularly hard to define. There is, it turns out, a reason that people say “you’ll just know” when pushed to tell us how we’ll be able to tell if we’re feeling the big L. It pops up in so many different forms – one person’s love is another’s lust, and even from love interest to love interest the experience and feelings of “love” are highly changeable.
Take, for example, the first time I felt I was “in love”. I got all fluttery when I saw the object of my affections – my stomach flipped over and it was all very teenage and exciting. It felt like the world as I knew it had changed, and I wandered around with a glazed look in my eye and a certainty that this? This was love. It could be nothing else.
Then came my next love interest. The feelings were stronger, I swooned, I “realised” that what I had felt before couldn’t be love – because this incarnation was so very different. Surely love was only going to be one of those experiences, and it couldn’t be both?
The adult realisation? That actually, love comes in all shapes and sizes. A brief moment of pure and unadulterated love for someone you met in a bar is just as valid as the lifelong love of a strong and enduring partnership. There is the soft and steady love you have for your family, the interdependence based love of a true friendship. There are moments of love, and lifetimes of love, and no two incidences will ever feel exactly the same.
The important thing is that you don’t constantly belittle your previous loves with the experience of a new one. Just because those feelings are so fresh and so “new”, doesn’t make your last time any less worthwhile. It’s just a new love, a different love. That’s all.