New Love and Old Love

How is it that newly found love is so wonderful, but after a while then, it wears off and may be considered old love, perhaps still there but quite different so that we would like to experience “new” love again?

Consider how people fall in love, like a 15 year old girl on a family TV program was swept off her feet when a fellow smiled at the dinner table, and later she cried when he left the family. So also, newly marrieds are often immensely happy at their wedding and hopefully on their honeymoon having promised to love until death parts them. Yet many break that vow, being lured by a new lover, or seeking out someone who turns them on again like the first love as if their first love becomes an old love and the want a fresh new love again.

There are many other examples on great first love and enthusiasm only to wish for a renewed love when time has passed with the first love. A new challenging job with hope may get old even when it succeeds. New church members and believers in Christ may also experience their first love wearing down so they may wonder what all the excitement was about in the beginning. Why does this happen so regularly so that there must be some underlying common causes for this occurrence?

On common factor is that a first love is usually based on inexperience and an only a partial understanding of what will be involved. Newlyweds have usually been on their best behavior and putting their best side forward and who they really are in the stresses of life and continual close living only comes out over time in new situations and feeling not experienced before. The nitty-gritty of the job after the glitter is worn off may make it only more of the same day after day. Spiritual highs are not usually maintained, however one feeds them. So initial highs of enthusiasm and love are based on partial knowledge of what a continued satiation of that situation will bring forth as it is lived out.

Love also resembles an addiction in that a little will give you a high in the beginning but will require more and newer experiences to duplicate what was experienced at first. The teen who gets excited over a smile at first, later needs far more expressions of love to feel that good. After you have learned the job you thought would be so exciting, you later wonder what more there is to experience to make it challenging as it was in the beginning. Perhaps the first love was never meant to be realty in the long haul. After the honeymoon, you need to live in the real world, not that of fantasy

Could a better orientation and set of expectations prepare one for the experience of life after the first love wears off? Perhaps to separate infatuation from the reality of human experience would be helpful, but what officiator at a wedding wants to tell the whole story of the darkest parts of married life? Or could employers find workers if he told applicants the whole story of the job? Would anybody get married or take a job if they knew everything? Further, how far would marriage get without the initial boost of enthusiasm of the hope to live happily ever after? Perhaps there is some value in affirming our first loves with some understanding of the necessity and reality of long term perseverance in the inevitable new experiences and vicissitudes of life