First love can ruin subsequent relationships

London, January 18: Benjamin Disraeli has rightly said “The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.” According to a new research, the euphoria of first love can damage subsequent relationships. Hanging on to the ghosts of an era gone by can wreck the happiness of the present moment.

Dr Malcolm Brynin, principal research officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, dwells on this aspect of relationships, in the book Changing Relationships.

According to Brynin, “it seems that the secret to long-term happiness in a relationship is to skip a first relationship. In an ideal world, you would wake up already in your second relationship."

Judging adult relationships against your first relationship is unrealistic. By making comparisons with the early days of youth when every thing was passionate, spontaneous and intense, you are deliberately ruining your life.

In the course of his study, Brynin found that one is deluding oneself by constantly using the first love as a parameter to measure all other relationships.

He specified that "If you had a very passionate first relationship and allow that feeling to become your benchmark for a relationship dynamic, then it becomes inevitable that future, more adult partnerships will seem boring and a disappointment.

“Adults in successful long-term partnerships are those who have taken a calm, pragmatic view of what they need from a relationship.”

Dr Gayle Brewer, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, felt that enhancing long term relationships and bonding with partners require people to be committed and reliable.

She said, “Someone who excels in spontaneity is unlikely to also have those characteristics. So you're caught in a bind: the characteristics that excite you are the ones that lead to the failure of an adult relationship.

“If you emotionally fixate on having the excitement, while knowing you need the reliability, you're making demands that no relationship can satisfy."

The book is generating opposing views from some. Professor Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, believes that the intensity of emotion can help relationships survive. In a comparative study using MRI scans on happily married couples and those at the onset of an affair, she “found incontrovertible, physiological evidence that romantic love can last.”

However, Dr Brynin’s observation was "The problems start if you try not only to get everything you need for an adult relationship, but also strive for the heights of excitement and intensity you had in your first experience of love.

“The solution is clear: if you can protect yourself from intense passion in your first relationship, you will be happier in your later relationships.”