How Your First Love Shapes Future Relationships

Your first love can feel exciting and exhilarating in the moment, and it can also have lasting impacts. A first relationship often carries significant emotional weight due to the brain’s chemical connections and significant hormonal shifts associated with early attachment. This concept relates to first love theory, which is the idea that early love might shape how we express emotions and approach a subsequent relationship.

If you find a first love is shaping your present relationships — or thoughts of future ones — a bit too much, you may begin to feel stuck. Understanding the impact of a first love and finding productive ways to move forward can help you develop healthy, fulfilling relationships.

Different experiences of young love

When it comes to the first time you fall in love, feelings and memories tend to be very personal. For instance, some people might have first fallen in love during when they were in their teenage years, while others have their first experience with romantic love in later decades. Some people might even insist that they fell in love for the first time when they were as young as five or six years old.

Some may recall the initial stages of “puppy love” — a youthful, intense feeling of romantic love — sometimes full of movie-worthy love letters, poetry, roses, or heart-shaped boxes of chocolate that can change your whole world. Some may even say they experience “love at first sight,” described by researcher Helen Fischer as the attraction we may feel within the first three minutes of meeting someone—though she notes that this initial attraction fizzles quickly without a strong emotional connection to follow it.

Some may have stayed with their first love for a long period, while it was a short time for others. Some may never have been in an official relationship with the first person they loved, but the memories can be strong nevertheless.

How the “one that got away” mindset can make you idealize a past relationship

If you dated your first love for some time but eventually broke up, you might end up with heartache and lingering feelings for them. You might look back and wonder how your life could have been different if you had stayed together. In rare cases, “the one that got away” can turn into a rekindled love—but even if not, the memory of that relationship can affect you later in life.

The science behind first love: What happens in the brain and body

According to cognitive scientists, feel-good brain chemicals called neurotransmitters are released when we’re in love, including dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, and serotonin. Physical touch can make pleasurable feelings even more intense. The brain may remember these pleasurable feelings and intense sensations from your first love and make you want to re-experience the neurochemical “high” you felt then.

Because early love unleashes chemical connections like these, it can make early relationships feel intense and unforgettable. These powerful forces can leave lasting memories in the brain’s emotional centers, shaping attraction patterns or expectations for future relationships. 

If you’re curious about how your early experiences with romance and love may have shaped your beliefs or behaviors today, working with a professional could be useful. A licensed clinical social worker or marriage and family therapist can often help a person understand how early experiences can create mental “blueprints” for sustainable love and how to break any unhealthy patterns in the emotional realm of one’s life.

How true is “You never forget your first love”?

“You never forget your first love” is a famous cliché that can have some truth to it, since falling in love affects the hormonal interactions in your brain. Especially when a first love occurs during adolescence, people may be more likely to vividly remember the associated feelings. It can create an imprint on the brain while individuals are developing neurologically and forming their identities. 

As a result, some people with a strong early love may continue to chase that type of feeling or dwell on the memory of it long after the experience. While there’s nothing harmful about fond nostalgia, clinging too tightly to an early experience of love may be unhealthy and block you from forming new, authentic connections. This concept is part of what’s known as “first love theory.”

First love theory: how early connections might shape future relationships

First love theory is not an evidence-based psychological theory, but an idea that has become popular on social media platforms like TikTok. It proposes that some people never forget their first romantic partner, suggesting that the initial spark of an early, past love sets expectations for what love “should” feel like in a subsequent relationship with a new partner. While a first love usually doesn't last, some believe it influences how they’ll connect with future romantic partners and other experiences they may have in the emotional realm of the current dating landscape.

An article on the topic quotes Shanna Kattari, associate professor at the School of Social Work and in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Michigan. Kattari says that the powerful rush of feel-good chemicals in the brain that a first love can bring may leave a lasting impression, “even long after that initial spark is gone, whether or not we are still in that relationship." While the memories may persist, allowing them to negatively impact your current or future relationships can be harmful and limiting. People who find themselves having trouble moving past an early relationship might benefit from working with a licensed marriage and family therapist or relationship counselor to process these powerful feelings and rewire unhelpful patterns.

Societal and cultural perspectives on first love

When thinking about the impacts of first love on a person’s life, it can be worthwhile to consider the influence of certain societal and cultural perspectives. 

For example, social media users as well as movies and books often romanticize a first love, setting expectations for an idealized, happenstance, “once-in-a-lifetime” event—even though sustainable love often unfolds differently. These ideas can put a societal pressure on people to act or feel a certain way within relationships. Or, they could cause someone to end promising, healthy connections in search of the undefined, mythical, “amazing feelings” often associated with early relationships. 

Another common but misleading idea is that only people of certain genders or orientations can experience a passionate and exciting first love. In reality, people of all genders and orientations have the potential to experience early love deeply—not women only, or just heterosexual individuals. That said, the way people are socialized and other circumstances may affect how they process or show these feelings.

When a first love experience creates harmful patterns

While some people may idealize their first romantic relationship, early love also has the potential to create harmful patterns that can be tough to break, such as love addiction, low self-esteem, or difficulty trusting. Also, unresolved emotions or trauma from past love can make it harder to build real trust or sustainable love later. 

Licensed therapists note that many people unconsciously stand in their old emotional roles, recreating dynamics that no longer serve them. Identifying these patterns can be the first step toward forming healthier ones.

Emotional lessons and growth: What people can learn from first love

The body experiences of falling in love that made you feel favorably at the time—the racing heart, adrenaline rush, and euphoria—can make for lasting memories, but so can the lessons learned. A first love has the potential to give a person formative experiences with empathy, communication, and vulnerability, which are skills they can take with them into future relationships. It’s also common for people to “rewrite” their first love story or look back on it differently as they age, reframing what happened with less difficulty and more gratitude.

Tips for moving on from a first love

Whether your first love was recent or years ago, it’s not uncommon to have trouble moving on—especially if you hold an idealized view of that person or that period in your life. However, it can be possible to rewrite your first love experiences with time, transforming heartbreak or regret into lessons learned and self-awareness gained. 

To start the process, a licensed clinical social worker or marriage and family therapist will often encourage journaling to express emotions and therapy to help you learn to build sustainable love and real trust with your current partner or a future partner. In addition, the following advice may be helpful:

• Feel your feelings. Naming the way you’re feeling without judgment can help you address your emotions in a positive way. Using mindfulness, journaling, or therapy to dig deeper into how you feel and why may help you process the emotions and move forward with more self-awareness.
• Take responsibility. If you feel responsible for the end of a past relationship and/or any pain caused, accepting that feeling with compassion can be a step toward healing and growth. You can be kind to yourself about it while still acknowledging the role you played and considering how you might handle relationships differently in the future.
• Focus on life outside of romantic relationships. Instead of dwelling on a past relationship, you might try expanding your focus to other areas of life. Taking time for self-care, enjoying non-romantic relationships, and focusing on hobbies can help you feel fulfilled.
• Consider what type of relationship you truly want. Self-reflection can help you understand what you’re looking for in a future relationship, what a healthy relationship looks like to you, and what kind of partner you’d like to be.

Therapy can help when you’re struggling to move on

In therapy, you can work on cultivating more constructive thoughts and behaviors related to relationships. A therapist can help you understand where difficult emotions may be coming from and work through them over time. You can also use therapy as a way to develop healthy interpersonal skills, like communication and boundary-setting, that may help you form stronger relationships in the future.

If feeling heartbroken or upset makes it hard to leave the house to attend therapy appointments, you might find it more comfortable and convenient to connect with a therapist virtually. Online therapy through a platform like BetterHelp allows you to get matched and then meet with a licensed therapist remotely, via phone, video, or live chat.

Online therapy tends to be more affordable than in-person therapy without insurance, making it a more accessible form of care for many people. Also, research suggests that virtual talk therapy can often be similarly effective to traditional, in-person talk therapy.