Are Youths Capable of Experiencing True Romantic Love?
I ask you to define love for me first.
When you are young, love is this mystical, unknown thing. It is this experience that the entire world seems to revolve around. For those that are curious, you either hate the idea of it, or you yearn for it, and either way it finds you.
One might argue that in this day and age, children are being raised into a generation filled with instant gratification and the need to chase the next best thing, but I don’t believe you can strip someone of their depth through nurture, or the lack there of. Our current society does not promote romance as much as it does freedom and exploration, because perhaps love is not the most important thing. Maybe to some people, the most important thing is independence, maybe it’s success, maybe it’s community. Perhaps sex and love do not have to be so deeply intertwined, or maybe they do. In our youth, the point is to explore and to decide what it is you want to go after, it is a learning experience, but are any of those experiences fake? Are they insincere? Should we frown upon them?
As a young person, you experience all feelings as though they are epic. Depression, anger, the need to fit in, the relief of being understood, and love, because each feeling presents itself in ways that a young person has never experienced before. Young love is such a romanticized concept because we all long for that feeling of experiencing love as though it is brand new, before and even long after we get to feel it for the first time. However, love cannot be defined in any one way. Love is perception just as much as it is a combination of chemicals.
The perception of what real love is and what it means is entirely subjective. When love is a new experience, you are discovering what it means to you, and in our lives that perspective changes many times over. Our definition of love grows and evolves at the rate of which we do, and whether or not someone is capable of that evolution is a different matter. I believe that someone being capable of experiencing love at a young age depends only on the individual and their openness/willingness. Love at that age may look like possessiveness, it may look like flaky affairs and flings, insecurities, jealousy, heartbreak, or fluttering hearts jumping into a feeling without having any real grasp on what it means to them yet. But society and immaturity can’t take away from a person’s ability to experience a feeling, perhaps only the ability to express.
So, define love, and if you can’t, then consider that people experience it in different ways circumstantially and throughout multiple periods of their lives, and that all perceptions and expressions of love are truth. The generational definition of love is evolving beyond what previous generations recognize, for better or worse, but all people are capable.
