Love in a lifetime

I thought I had read every piece in the first YoungBlood anthology, but this afternoon as I was going through the book while waiting for the power to come back on (yes, the daily brownouts are back after going away in the days leading up to and in the weeks after the elections), I came across an article I hadn't read before, "One Love, One Lifetime" by quickmelt.

I know how teens are about love, being a teen myself. At this age, with hormones rushing through our system, we have these nirvanic ideas of love. We think it's this blissful emotion that makes everything reek of flowers and rainbowy happiness, and once we feel love, we tell ourselves that this is it, that if we let go we will face misery for the rest of our lives.

That's understandable, I guess. As naïve teens, we know little about reality, wrapped as we are in the euphoria of carefree youth.


But if there's one thing I learned about love in the past few years, it's that love the emotion is only a result of love the journey, and what a turbulent journey it is. Only a very small percentage of high school sweethearts get married; many men and women squirm when they reminisce their high school romances, no matter how wonderful they felt then. The first few years of love are bound to be rocky, and thank goodness they are—when we first foray into love and experience a few happy times and a few bad ones, we get the general feel of what we're looking for and how to play the field. That makes finding The One an easier task.

Don't get me wrong—I've had my share of euphoria and heartbreak in love. The former can be the best feeling in the world; the latter, the darkest. I know what it feels to have rainbows of glee shooting through my veins, to talk to a special someone and see the whole world vanish into an irrelevant blur. I've had my nights of depression, as well, times when I wanted the Earth to open up and swallow me whole, to go back to before I met *insert name here* so that *insert emotionally debilitating experience with romance here* would never happen. Every teen goes through it; how we deal with it differs. Some people choose to learn things from these early experiences; others, like quickmelt, choose to wallow in the past.

People like quickmelt should realize that there's life after heartbreak, that no matter how dreary things may be, you can always get up, dust yourself off, and move on if you will it. Sure, it takes longer for some wounds to heal than others, but they always heal in due time. Sometimes you just have to realize it's time to hit "play" and continue with life.

Think of what you can do with one lifetime: jump off a plane, crisscross Europe, learn to cook, chase your dreams and make them come true. One lifetime—the only one we get—is too precious to waste on just romance, let alone on just one love.