Have you ever had one of those blinding moments of clarity? You know, the ones that make you see everything in a completely new light?
I was invited to dinner a few days ago. As I broke bread with this wonderful family, I sat beside their eldest son. I’ve watched him grow up for the past few years, starting as a shy boy starting grade 9 in a new country. Now in grade 12, he’s a polite and handsome young man with a shock of black hair, bright sparkling eyes and olive skin. He was confidently telling me about his university plans – where he’d applied and which school had started sending acceptance letters.
He’s right at the beginning of such an exciting time in life – going away to school and figuring out who he is as an almost-grownup, slowly beginning to define himself as an individual. I remember those years. It was so thrilling to be away from the safety of home and be learning how do to things for myself and learning about myself in the process.
As these thoughts were spinning around me, it suddenly hit me.
I was basically the same age when young love struck. Another handsome young man the same age with his own wild dark hair, bright eyes and olive skin declared his love for me and I for him. How grown up we felt, with plans beyond anything that could ever have become real. We spent hours together learning everything about each other.
With heads together over steaming glasses of tea or walking arm in arm up and down hills we talked and planned and schemed about our future. Of course my young love gave way to the realities of universities, different dreams and plain, simple geography – and while it didn’t seem that way at the time, completely inevitable and proper, looking back at it years later.Since then, there’s been much love in my life, but nothing beats the memory of young love. It wasn’t my first – which was sweet and simple in its own way – but it was a special one.
It got me thinking about why young love is so intense. There are studies that prove that it is. Some suggest it’s just surging hormones. Others suggest it’s because we don’t have years of baggage clouding our feelings, and we don’t dodge potential connections based on the fear of getting hurt. And I suppose that’s right. As we get older, we have more life experiences to draw from and the more we weigh choices one against another. As I got older, other loves have been fuller, deeper and more meaningful, but also more cautious and more measured.
Snapping my attention back to the present, I couldn’t help looking at my dinner companion with fresh eyes remembering anew how I felt at that age. He’s on the cusp of exactly those kinds of life-changing experiences. While to me, from my vantage point of a few decades on, he still seems so young, I know he must be chafing at the restrictions of not-quite-finished high school days and just as ready to take on the world, feeling as grown up as I did. I wish him all the best as he looks forward to this new chapter. And don’t tell his parents, but I hope that he too may soon experience his own young love to make memories to last a lifetime.
