Why Do We Idealize First Loves? (2024)

After many recommendations, I finally started and finished watching the Netflix series One Day, based on the book by David Nicholls. The story is intriguing, showcasing the same date, year after year, over nearly two decades, as we follow the story of Dexter and Emma. Through the years, we watch Emma secretly pine after "Dex," only to become her own independent woman in the truest sense of the word.

Through her journey, she eventually learns to make choices in her life that suit her best. This culminates in her eventually choosing her first love, Dex. Instead of him, as she once swooned, choosing her.

Dex, on the other hand, realizes his wish of being famous and rich in his youth, only to fall on harder times later: losing his television hosting career, his marriage, and nearly his daughter while trying to overcome addiction. But he finds purpose, becomes emotionally mature, and eventually comes to Emma. In the end, they both realize that they’ve grown up together, loving each other through it all.

One Day, along with this year’s Oscar-nominated film Past Lives, explores similar themes: missed moments, unexplored opportunities, the grief, pain, and gravity that come from the unrealized potential of what could have been "true love," and ultimately, the question of, "What if?"

These themes dance around the nucleus of true love, somehow defined in the innocence of a child or young adulthood. The Western rhetoric of one’s true love originating in first or childhood love is potent, with Romeo and Juliette perhaps the most famous fictional depiction of true love.

Why are stories like this so emotionally potent, and what do they bring up in us?

Simply, they fulfill the core beliefs we have about relationships.

We all have deeply engrained and implicit beliefs about romantic relationships: how they start, how they might change, and what being in them feels like. These beliefs affect how we “think, perceive, respond, and behave in romantic relationships from beginning to end” (Knee & Petty, 2013).

In the chapter, Implicit Theories of Relationships, in the Oxford Handbook of Close Relationships, researchers outline the two main beliefs about romantic relationships: destiny and growth beliefs. According to the authors:

Destiny belief concerns the stability of one's impressions about romantic relationships and involves believing that relationships are either meant to be or are not. Growth belief concerns the perceived stability of problems in the relationship and reflects the assumption that relationships can be maintained and problems can be overcome.

This means practically that people who hold destiny beliefs are more fixed in their beliefs, more likely to believe that partners are "mind readers," causing them to communicate their needs and wants less, and generally think a relationship is meant to be, or not. When someone with destiny beliefs meets a potential partner, they can choose to stay with that partner, believing them to be “the one.” Or, upon early conflict that most relationships need to navigate past, the person with destiny beliefs might quickly disengage, abandoning the relationship with the conviction that “it wasn’t meant to be.”

With this "soulmate thinking," termed by Jason Carrol, a lead author of The Soulmate Trap: Why Embracing Agency-Based Love Is the Surest Path to Creating a Flourishing Marriage, people can become paralyzed in dating, moving quickly from person to person because they are not meeting "the one."

However, a potential downfall of destiny beliefs is believing someone to be a soul mate, regardless of how we are treated. They are also less likely to lead to satisfying long-term outcomes, as they are less likely to work on problems within a relationship or on improving the relationship over time.

On the other hand, growth beliefs give less credence to the start of a relationship, seeing it more as a process of getting acquainted. Generally, people with these beliefs believe relationships can be developed and worked on with communication and effort, evaluating long term compatibility instead of having harsh criteria and dismissing potential good fits early on.

A potential downfall of growth beliefs, however, is believing that someone who isn’t treating us very well can change if we only put more effort into it.

The magic of stories like that presented in One Day is that they capitalize on both beliefs: From the destiny perspective, first loves that last are each other’s soul mates. They were destined to be together through the years, no matter what came.

From the growth perspective, first loves that stayed connected through years showcase that true love supports an individual’s growth and change, even if that means temporarily no longer being in each other’s life, and that only after having improved oneself and worked on the relationship can true love enter.