Forgetting your first love will make future love better.

Your first love is usually the one that sticks in your mind longest of all. Who among us, unless it was a complete disaster, wants to forget that sublime moment of bliss when all the universe came together and all was perfect and good? British sociologists, on the other hand, say you should forget it. So why are a bunch of unromantic fuddy-duddies telling us that our first fumbling steps into the world of romance is something we should just forget?

It seems that the blissful moments spent with the one who switches you on to the wonders and delights of love and romance will create a memory of intense passion that no future relationship can possibly live up to.

“It seems that the secret to long-term happiness in a relationship is to skip a first relationship,” says Dr Malcolm Brynin, a sociologist at the University of Essex who has edited a new book written by leading sociologists. He even goes on to proclaim that, “In an ideal world, you would wake up already in your second relationship.”

The book in question is entitled, Changing Relationships. It’s a collection of research papers that have the ring of cold clinical study, though to be fair they say that only those who idealise their first love experience are the ones who will suffer most. Anyone who treats the euphoria of their first love as something wonderful, but realises that futures relationship may not always have that degree of vibrancy, are likely to have less of a problem.

Finding happiness in later life relationships depends on an individual coming to terms with life and accepting that the heady days of youth were different. That doesn’t mean that a later relationship can’t be fulfilling. Far from it. The book argues that such a relationship will be much more fulfilling if the first love experience is not set up as the benchmark that all other experiences are expected to measure up to.

For Dr Malcolm Bryin it’s all very obvious. He says, “The solution is clear: if you can protect yourself from intense passion in your first relationship, you will be happier in your later relationships.” However, his views are not being presented without an opposing view.

In far off New Jersey in Rutgers University, Professor Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, says: “I found incontrovertible, physiological evidence that romantic love can last. It appears that romantic love exists not only to initiate pair-bonding but to maintain and enhance long-term relationships.”

People who are currently in a successful long-term relationship that is not their first relationship are likely to ignore the findings in this book. Their experiences are contrary to the book’s findings, which suggests that not everyone is created equal, something we all already knew anyway.

It would be a shame if young people everywhere were to try and avoid the bliss and euphoria of that first romance. It’s an experience that we all need to have, and it will only happen once. Perhaps the compromise is to accept that nothing will ever quite live up to the first one and let it be at that.

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