Furthermore, I ditto the other great posts that have remarked on love’s ethereal nature. Likewise, no one can (or should) tell you what love is, or isn’t. But you know they will try, so let them have their fun. When you’re older you might have your turn to reach back your pearls of wisdom to a new generation.
Just remember the magic, that’s all I say. I know many people who have acquiesced to the “Borg of Society’s Ideals” (as Manda JO has implied, the force feeding of what you should be feeling, and doing, by definition. Yuck!)
I don’t think one is incapable of falling in love while they’re in their mid-teenage years. I do, however, think that for the most part many of the teens who do say that they’re in love are confusing it with attraction, lust, infatuation, etc. I have seen all together too many times friends who “fall in love” with their boyfriend only to be completely over him a week later. Granted this is part of teenage life and they probably don’t mean “in love” in the sense that the OP speaks about, but it still irks me from time to time. I do have complete faith in the fact that no matter how old you are, you can fall in love. I just don’t believe that, in the average few of weeks that a usual H.S. relationship lasts, that kind of bond can be formed between two people.
The large amount of teenagers that run around falling in love with every person they date is probably the reason that at a young age people aren’t taken seriously when they utter that four letter word, whether they mean it or not.
IMHO, love is a spectrum, not an absolute and different for everybody.
I have been with the same person for about 9 years now. We met when we were 14. I thought it was love. When we were 16/17 things changed and again, I thought it was love. When we moved in and lived together, things were different but I still thought it was love. When we spent a year backpacking around Asia and Europe, together 24/7, it was different again and it was love. Now we are married and living again together and things are different again and it’s definitely love.
What I’m trying to get across to you is that you, as an individual, will change. Your thoughts, beliefs, needs and wants will change, and will keep changing. Some people are right for you at certain times in your life and some people are right for you always. I’m lucky in that each change has brought us closer, not moved us apart. This is not something that you can really control. It’s love if you feel that it’s love. And don’t worry about what others say. Only you can know if you’re in love. If you’re honest with yourself, and you think you are in love, then you are. Nobody else’s opinion is worth more than yours in this matter.
I see I should elaborate. By saying that “we’re not going to get married and live happily ever after,” I did not mean that I don’t want that to happen. I do. More than anything. And so does he. Rather, I am saying that I know that I am not simply in a fleeting little fling where I swoon and swear away the rest of my life.
My boyfriend and I are best friends, above all. There is no one I feel more comfortable with, and no one with whom I have more in common. I hope, and believe that we will grow and mature together in complementing ways. And if we don’t? I don’t know. I know this might happen, and the thought of it hurts. So, though it is the last thing in the world I want, I can cope with the painful possibility that maybe, just maybe, we will not spend our entire lives together because we both have so much growing to do.
Does this mean we are not in love? No. It means I have a pretty realistic view. While my love is burning and wonderful and by far the best thing that has ever happened to me, I am not blinded by it.
I am 18. The person that I love is 21. If I had to marry someone right now, I’d choose him. If something happened and I had the choice of letting him die or dying in his place, I’d die in his place. I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, and I’d like to think he’d do the same for me.
I’m just waiting for him to realize that I truly do love him this much and that he can trust me…and I’m prepared to wait awhile.
Maybe that’s not love…but it’s the damned closest thing I’ve ever experienced.
I am not posting all of this in order to gain validity for my being in love. Not to say these responses don’t matter (they do, and I love reading them), but I am not aiming for everyone here to say, “Ohhhh, you must be in love.” I get enough of the not-true-love stuff that I don’t really mind what other people say about my relatonship. I just want to share my insight as others are theirs.
Easy. Sure you can love as a teenager. But remember that love requires experience & time. Especially, time to learn to love someone by getting to know who they are, that’s something young people don’t have yet, cause they are time impaired :-).
This is actually a good example of how love is different when you are young. It’s easy to die for someone. It’s diffucult to spend two weeks with the [url"http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=102620"]in-laws who think that you are exagerating when you you say “A taste of peanut butter and I will fall over dead. I am not joking,” who think that you could be so pretty if you would just “do something with your hair let me help,” and who assume that as a female you’ll do a full share of the domestic duties and leave your husband to watch the game. (None of these are my in-laws, but all mates come with something like this.) You only have to die once–you have to accept every day that they take 20 minutes to take a dump and there’s only one bathroom in the house and there it’s not thier fault but you have to go right now Damnit hop hop hop. Next to agreeing to love–and support–her two kids as if they were your own every single day for the rest of your life, dying is a snap.
If you want to find out if it’s the forever kind of love, don’t ask yourself, “would I push them out of the way and take the bullet?” Ask yourself, “would I still be wiping the feces off their butt two years after they stopped being able to recognize me?”
WOW! MJ, this is GREAT! I think I will have to copy and paste this to everyone I know. This points out a major difference between “teenage” love and “adult” love.
I think it’s easier to love someone as a teenager. You don’t have to live with them day in and day out. You don’t know all their bad habits (no matter how much time you spend with someone, you don’t really know them until you’ve inhabited the same living area for a while) you don’t have to worry about who’s paying the bills, who’s changing the diapers, who’s doing the laundry, who’s to blame when something goes wrong…
You’ve made some great points, and I love your delivery. My husband - a man who agreed to love and support my two children as if they were his own every single day for the rest of his life - enjoyed it, too.
Now I’ve got this classic Beatles tune running through my head:
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?
When I met Jaime I was 15. He was my first boyfriend, and I completely fell in love with him. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Fast-forward 3 years, and we got married. I will honestly say that the love I felt for him then was different than what I felt on our wedding day. And six months after we tied the knot, I have to say that it’s a different feeling. Each stage was love, but now it’s a matter of degree.
So, from my own perspective, I’d say that 16 is not too young to be inlove. But I honestly think that’s it’s the mellowest, shallowest (NOT IN A NEGATIVE WAY), form of being inlove.
Without reading the whole thread, my response is that young people aren’t too young to love, but often they’re too young to sustain love.
When I was 15, I was madly in love with my boyfriend. We were together 11 months, which was considered to be an exceptionally long time. Despite having everything in common when we first got together, we had nothing in common when we broke up because we were both growing and changing so much that 11 months made a significant difference to both our personalities.
YMMV, but I was at least 21 before I was mature enough to love someone deeply and abidingly. Before that, I’d never had a relationship last more than 16 months straight. The way I love is different - as a teen it was more intense at the start and tended to burn out quickly. I loved Mr Cazzle from the moment I met him, but it was different from what I’d experienced as a teen and is more lasting. For a start, we have so many common goals, ideals, morals, interests and outlooks - we keep each other amused. My boyfriends when I was an adolescent tended to have one thing in common with me, and nothing else. There was one in particular who didn’t like anything I liked, and vice versa - no wonder we grew sick of each other so quickly. Another shared some of my interests but we disagreed on a major moral point. That one was doomed to failure too.
I think when I was a teenager, I was very affected by hormones - I realised this when my body calmed down when I was about 19. Any feelings I thought I experienced and any choices I made as a teen were fueled by hormones. Not all teens are as affected as I was, but my entire personality changed dramatically between the ages of 14 and 19 because of what was going on in my body. I was mean and reckless and angry, I tended to jump from one relationship to the next, I had little or no common sense. When my teenage years were over, I suddenly found myself turning into a grown-up version of the girl I’d been all my childhood. That horrible creature that took over my body for 5 years vanished altogether. Now if I’d married my boyfriend when I was 18, I had that complete change in personality when I turned 19 - that would have made quite some difference to our relationship.
Perhaps when people tell teenagers that they are too young to love, they are really trying to tell you that many things will change for you between now and when you’re officially an adult, and there’s no reason to rush. If your love is going to last forever, rushing out to get married is pointless since you have all the time in the world. Best to be sure that you’ve both grown up before marrying in haste and repenting at leisure.
I’m in roughly the same boat as fizzes (first serious relationship, etc.)–except I’m five years older and still don’t think I’m old enough to really know what love is. :rolleyes:
Whereas I read cazzle’s post and saw myself - I’m not even 19 yet, but I’ve been realizing the same things about myself over the past year - the difference between who I was just a couple of years ago and who I am now… and the way I feel for Gunslinger is definitely a mature emotion, not the way I felt for anyone when I was younger.
Well, Mrs Mercotan and I met when we were 15, and started dating. We stayed pretty exclusive, and married at age 23. We were in love as teens, as newlyweds, and still are, after 20 years of marriage. But what we have now in terms of love is so different from what we had as teens (and soooo much better, I hasten to add!), that I realize that we really didn’t have much of a clue as to what it was about back then, and pretty much lucked out to stay together and grow together. It’s really in the past decade that we’ve come to love each other as individuals, rather than as extensions or props of ourselves. Nearly 30 years of dealing with life on life’s terms together will change a couple.
My words? Good luck, it can all work out. But I’ve gotta be honest and say that a lot of the time, it doesn’t.
I don’t think that your ability to love can be determined by your age.
I know that my grandparents were in love. They married when my grandmother was 15 and stayed married until she died at 52. Anyone can tell from the pictures and stories my grandfather has that they were in love the entire time.
In contrast, both my father and my uncle succumbed to love many times while they were in their twenties and thirties. My father was married and divorced three times before he married my mother when he was about 30. My uncle was also married and divorced three times during his thirties.
This doesn’t mean that every teenager is in love and that every adult isn’t. I just want to show that not every teenager is too young and that not every adult knows as much about love as they think they do.
I personally believe that you should make sure that you’re really in love before you do anything rash. Those three little words(you know the ones I’m talking about)can make the receiver the happiest person in the world, but they can also do a lot of damage if you don’t really mean them even if you think that you do at the time. Thinking you’re in love and being in love are two different things entirely. Somethimes it takes a while to figure out which is which.
This pretty much sums up what I was going to say. You can feel love and know what it is, but you have to know what to do with it. Some people never learn.
I don’t think that age has anything to do with it. I had no bleeding idea what love was, nor was I all that interested in finding out, until I was 17. (Not old at all, but most people I know say they’d been in love at least twice by that age.) Then I met Pat, my best friend in the entire world, and now I’ve got it figured out. I don’t think anyone can know what love is until someone shows them. Age has nothing to do with it. I’m glad that I didn’t fall in love until I had grey hair; it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and it’s definitely worth the wait.
I first fell in love at 15 with my first serious boyfriend. I do believe it was real and genuine love. However, it was love that lacked perspective and outlook. I was very wrapped up in him and I was constantly amazed by the way love made me feel. What an unbelievable high and source of joy. It was fantastic. But I had so little life experience, I felt like I had no good context for those feelings. I had no reliable way to think about him and me and us in true-life situations where our love might really be tested. Real-life is not high school. High school and college certainly present some challenges to face together, but they are utterly different than the challenges and joys and experiences a more mature couple face.
When I got older, out of college, when I knew myself and my values and my perspective a little better, that was easier to picture. And I think it made my feelings of love a lot more real – and more realistic. It also meant what I loved about a man was different, too. I valued certain things more, other things less. These are things that I believe will be sustained over time, whereas some of the things I loved best about my adolescent boyfriends aren’t necessarily the things I’d want in a husband.
And don’t worry about what others say. Only you can know if you’re in love. If you’re honest with yourself, and you think you are in love, then you are. Nobody else’s opinion is worth more than yours in this matter.