Getting over a loved one isn’t easy and if they get over us quickly, it hurts even more. Now, let us rephrase the question the way it should be. Does my first love still think of me as much as I do?
Your first love still thinks of you if they didn’t get into a better relationship than what they had with you. But if they’ve had a far better experience with someone else, you are not on their mind anymore. At most, you’ll be a passing thought.
We will tackle these scenarios one by one. The goal here is to help you see things more clearly and ultimately take better actions.
Before We Begin
With a clear goal, we are in a much better position to help you deal with the question and your feelings in general.
This goal will set the tone of the article. We won’t shy away from the harsh truths.
We have several cases of relationships falling apart where one person thought about their first love even after sixty long years.
Similarly, we have several instances where the other forgot about their ex as soon as they moved into a new relationship.
TABLE: People Missing Their First Love At Different Stages Of Life
| Time Since First Breakup | Met Someone Better? | Still Think About First Love? (Majority) | Percentage Of People Who Still Miss Their First Love |
|---|---|---|---|
| < 3years | No | Yes | 94% |
| < 3years | Yes | No | 7% |
| 3-5 years | No | Yes | 89% |
| 3-5 years | Yes | No | 9% |
| 6-10 years | No | No | 42% |
| 6-10 years | Yes | No | 4% |
| 11-20 years | No | No | 29% |
| 11-20 years | Yes | No | 7% |
| 21-50 years | No | No | 26% |
| 21-50 years | Yes | No | 33% |
| 50+ years | No | Yes | 52% |
| 50+ years | Yes | Yes | 51% |
So, those of you who have been looking for a definite answer, you are in for some major disappointment.
When Does Your First Love NOT Think About You?
We will be laying out different reasons as to when or not your first love thinks about you. Why are we doing that?
Because failing to educate yourself will make you repeat the same mistakes that you did in your first relationship.
Also, we hope that by reading these, you will be able to assess your situation in a much better way and know the reasons behind the answer you find.
This is a significant improvement over trying to find a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer to whether your first love thinks about you or not. Let the reason games begin!
1. When They Have No Reason To
Plain and simple. This is more in continuation of our short answer above. Imagine yourself being in a happy relationship.
Or chuck it, imagine yourself being just happy, irrespective of the fact that whether you are in a relationship or not.
In that moment of euphoria, do you even have an iota of care about things around you? People with whom you had fallen out in the past.
Do they matter? When we are doing good in life, our past struggles or sorrows cease to exist within our memory. That is just how the human mind works.
Your first love surely doesn’t miss you now, but will they in the future or not is an altogether different question.
2. When You Become A Distant Memory
After you, it is quite possible that a lot of things may have happened in their life.
What seems to you just a few months or years since you two parted ways, something life-changing might have happened to them in the meanwhile.
Maybe it gave an altogether different path to their life.
And even if something of that magnitude did not happen, it is quite possible that the monotony of life set in.
When we become accustomed to routine chores with schedules that do not even allow us to breathe, remembering our first love becomes a distant thing.
A thought or two here and there about the time spent doesn’t count. It is thinking actively that we are concerned about here.
3. If They Meet Someone New
Finally, we address the dreadful part that keeps you awake at night. Hurts, doesn’t it? Let it, because the sad truth is that you have no control over their life.
They or even your meeting someone was bound to happen sooner than later.
Meeting someone new romantically is always an exciting thing and often makes us forget about our ex.
It is just that they happened to meet someone new before you.
Had you met someone, they might have been the ones searching the answer for ‘Does my first love still think of me’.
Therefore, don’t be too harsh on yourself if your ex didn’t feel happy with you. It’s done. Can’t change it.
Instead, improve upon your shortcomings in order to have fulfilling relationships in the future.
4. Don’t Feel Anything Positive Or Negative About You
Just like love is an emotion, hatred too is an equally strong emotion. The only difference is that it rides the opposite wave.
We cannot even tell you the number of times where couples broke up, and one partner said they ‘hated’ the other person and we still saw them get back together within a couple of weeks or months.
Do you know which couples we do not see getting back together?
The ones where one partner stops feeling anything about the other one. Hatred is not the worst situation. The worst one is where someone couldn’t care less.
Thus, if your first love ended on a note where the other person stopped having feelings for you or the relationship felt like a burden, it is highly unlikely that they think about you.
5. When You Did Not Give Them Enough Memories
Often people find it hard to digest when we say that maybe their first love does not think about them because they are simply not worth thinking about.
Some become outright shocked and question how we can be the judge of whether they were worthy or not? Some even leave.
What they fail to realize is that by saying ‘they are simply not worth thinking about’, we are not judging their character.
It simply means they did not create enough excitement in the relationship, dates etc. for their first love to think about them. Why would they think about you?
And let us get one huge misconception out of the way. The length of your relationship has nothing to do with the intensity of memories.
Being in a long relationship does not necessarily mean that you shared a lot of wonderful memories.
On the contrary, more often than not, long relationships die of monotony.
On the other hand, even a 2-month relationship can feel like the most exciting thing in their life to a few people just because the person on the other end was doing something right.
When Does Your First Love Think About You?
Needless to say, the answer to this is going to be the complete opposite of what you read in the previous section.
But, we will try to give you a little different viewpoint than the obvious.
1. When You Give Them A Reason
By giving them a reason, we do not mean that you start stalking them or bothering them via calls and texts.
Yes, that too would give them a reason to think about you but the reason would be how to hand you over to cops or shoot you.
But for a moment think and reflect about your relationship with your first love (assuming that there was a relationship in the first place and it was not a one-sided affair).
Was it exciting? Or did they often complain of things being too dull and monotonous? How did they behave with you?
Were they happy to see you or you somehow felt that they looked for reasons to avoid seeing you?
Finding answers to these questions is the first step towards determining whether or not your first love thinks about you? It is still not the complete picture.
Hey! We don’t know how and why your relationship ended. Can’t blame us, can you?
2. When They Still Actively Try Not To Think About You
Try not to imagine a red hammer. We said NOT to imagine a RED HAMMER. Twice we told you not to, and twice you did it.
See where we are going with this? That is just how the human mind works.
The most your first love thinks about you is when they are actively trying to or not trying to think about you.
We’ll cover the ‘actively trying to’ part later on. Let us focus on the ‘actively not trying to’ part.
There can be a variety of reasons as to why your first love is not trying to think about you.
Once we decided to figure out the ‘why’ in several relationships, we caught hold of a common underlying reason.
There was still some form of emotional investment. The burden of it was too heavy to bear, and the memories seemed too strong.
It made them actively try not to think about their first love. Guess what they ended up doing anyway?
3. When You Are Still The Best That Has Happened To Them
We see so many people actively trying to do a lot of things.
They workout, read, watch sports, heck some even play it, trade, swim, surf, hike, and whatnot. And why do they do that?
Because they want to get better at something or the other.
But how many of us actively try to improve our emotional intelligence when it comes to relationships. No, we are not asking you to be emotional.
We are talking about being intelligent here.
Why is it so hard to realize that to be a better partner too, you need to work on yourself and your relationship simultaneously.
People who do that rarely find themselves asking questions like ‘Does my first love still think of me?’.
No we are not mocking you. We all make mistakes right and are here to learn.
But even if such people do get separated, often their love realizes sooner or later how valuable their ex was.
Did you make such efforts for your first love?
4. When The Memories Are Intense Enough
Assuming we are talking about positive memories here, (we’ll talk about the negative ones in the next point) when we have them, they are by far the biggest reason behind why we are not able to forget someone and move on.
Why? Because the realization hits us hard that the source of those happy memories where we felt on the top of the world is no longer with us.
This is the best-case scenario. If you wish that your first love still thinks about you, it should rather be this way than any other.
This is why we stressed the importance of creating good memories in one of the previous points. Bad memories heal like wounds, slowly and steadily.
But the good ones are the ones that make a person cry even after sixty years when they remember their first love.
We haven’t come across anybody yet who was crying after sixty years over a bad relationship.
But we have had our fair share of encounters with people whose eyes swelled up due to the good memories.
Now, we understand that exceptions exist and we don’t want a debate going on in the comments section. You may know some people, and we don’t. Savvy?
5. When They Actively Think About You
Thinking actively about you shows some form of emotional connection. It is by far the simplest of the reasons here.
The reason we chose to come back to this later rather than writing about it earlier is that it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.
But out of all the reasons, this is perhaps the one that will teach you something extraordinarily important.
Thinking actively about you need not be due to something positive always.
If you were an abusive person, mentally, physically, emotionally, etc. and the environment you created around them was a toxic one, still they will actively think about you.
But it would instead be thinking about getting revenge on you or how you ruined their life instead of feeling happy about being with you.
So, it is always important to check on your actions from time to time when you are in a relationship.
Not even unknowingly we are supposed to hurt the person we love, right?
And simultaneously reflect upon your actions and see if you made a grave mistake.
Your first love might be thinking about you, but is it necessarily due to something good?
Do Feelings For Your First Love Ever Go Away?
Feelings for your first love do go away gradually. What most people confuse as feelings a long time after their breakup are, in reality, neurological responses to the happy memories and the time spent together. You don’t miss your first love. You miss the good times you spent with them.
There is a difference between feelings and memories. Memories are not feelings and vice-versa.
They might be related to each other, trigger each other but understand that they are not the same thing. Why are we explaining this basic concept?
Because you need to be very clear about the difference when we answer your question.
1. Memories Trigger Feelings
When people feel like they are missing their first love very badly, more often than not, they are reminiscing about the good times spent with that person.
Note that these memories play a huge role in triggering the thoughts where a person feels that they still have feelings for their first love.
Years down the line as the memories begin to fade away, we begin to feel less and less bothered whenever we remember our first love.
For those of you who have just got out of their first relationship, it might seem like an impossible concept.
But ask those who have had their fair share of relationships, and they will attest to the fact that feelings don’t remain as strong over time.
2. This Too Shall Pass
What makes you cry today, might make you laugh at your own stupidity years down the line. It has happened with people before.
Billions of them, rinse, and repeat.
Now, exceptions do always exist where the person still had strong emotions when they heard about their first love or saw their picture after several years.
However, in these cases, their first love had been the only relationship in their life.
For some reason, most of them did not try to date anybody after their breakup. Those who did were not successful.
But the remaining majority, when compared to the handful of people mentioned above, got over the uncomfortable feelings related to their first love as soon as they were in a new relationship.
And if not, they were surely over their first love by the third or the fourth relationship. Nothing in the world is permanent, and neither are hurtful feelings.
They will pass. Yeah, these people still have bitter and sweet memories related to their first love, but it doesn’t bother them.
It just brings a smile to the faces of the people we talked to during the research phase before writing this article. So, to sum it up:
Do feelings for your first love ever go away: Yes.
Do memories of your first love ever go away: No.
Can You Be Friends With Your First Love?
You can be friends with your first love if you’ve been with someone you have loved far more. If you haven’t loved anybody more than your first love, your emotions will take over sooner or later. You’ll have a hard time being just friends.
On to the important question. Should you be with your first love? It depends.
If your bonding was strong enough to get the two of you into a relationship and out of it, then a platonic friendship can survive easily.
You still might have your disagreements over things, but they won’t bother you as much as they did in a relationship.
But the question is, can you behave in a way as if nothing romantic ever existed between you two? Will you be able to behave rationally?
Before quickly jumping to answer these questions as ‘Yes I can!’, read along.
1. The Battle Between Can And Should
According to us, it takes some superhuman strength and enormous amounts of emotional maturity to be friends with an ex and behave like a ‘normal friend.’
More often than not, emotions get the better of people, and they end up doing something which screws up the whole equation.
And then there is infinite regret as to why they thought of being friends with an ex in the first place.
You might think of being friends with your first love (ex) but will you be able to stay on friendly terms for long?
Okay, let us ask you a few questions, and then you can decide whether or not it would be a good idea to be friends with your first love.
It doesn’t matter that they are your immediate ex or someone from the past.
1. Will you be able to bear to see your first love in love with someone else?
2. What are your thoughts on them getting passionately intimate with this new person?
3. Are you sure you don’t want to share your joys and sorrows with your first love out of emotional weakness and dependency?
4. Are you comfortable with the idea of them being in your life and sure it won’t hurt you to be treated like a ‘friend’?
2. The Uncomfortable Answers
Now it’s time to find the answers to these uncomfortable questions. But guess what? Surprise, surprise!
The answers to these are not what we were going after. Answer these instead:
1. Did any of the above questions make you squirm uncomfortably?
2. Did you answer what you wanted to hear or think instead of being honest?
3. Do you find yourself looking for reasons to get in touch with your first love?
4. Does your first love invoke any form of strong emotions in you, positive or negative?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘Yes’, then my friend you are clearly in no position to be friends with your first love.
The day you stop feeling a thing for your first love and couldn’t bother less, that would be a safe place to start in terms of ‘being friends’.
But most probably, by that time you would no longer be interested in approaching them as ‘friends’.
As of right now, it’s in your best interest to stay away. You are only going to hurt yourself more.
“I Still Miss My First Love” – Sounds Like You?
For the sake of simplicity, we have divided our advice here into three different sections based on the time frame since which you have been away from your first love.
The instructions vary a bit in every segment, but the underlying message is the same. There is no magic pill that can suddenly make the pain go away.
1. Less Than 3 Months
If it has been less than three months since you have broken up with your first love, then please understand that whatever you are feeling won’t go away so soon.
There is absolutely nothing to worry about unless you are having severe bouts of depression and anxiety.
In that case, we urgently request you to visit a licensed medical professional as soon as possible. It is not wise to overlook such things.
In case you are just missing them badly and crying your heart out, it is something that happens with a lot of people.
Unfortunately, nothing we can say or do can make you feel instantly happy and better. This is the harsh truth, the sooner you accept it, the better it will be.
Don’t try to find an escape plan from this pain, embrace it, and you’ll have solid emotional armor for the rest of your life.
But read on the following sections to gain deeper insights.
2. Between 3-12 Months
For those of you who have not been in touch with their first love for more than three months but less than a year, things will begin to improve gradually now.
But they are not going to happen on their own while you are sitting on your couch. This is the time to go out and make up for all the time you’ve lost.
Not the advice you were looking for? Let us explain. When your first love parted from you, they carried away a certain image of you in their mind.
An image of the person you were at that point in time.
Thus what makes you think that if ever they cross your path, then they’ll be attracted to the same kind of person?
You must know how important attraction is. Thus, go out and work on yourself.
Hit the gym, learn a new skill, take personality development, sales, writing, or a communication course.
Join a new art class, do improv, learn martial arts, do whatever the hell interests you but don’t keep sitting and waiting for things to happen.
But before you even begin, do not do all this with the sole purpose of making your first love come back in your life.
Don’t hang on to the romantic idea that you’ll get back together one day. Because if you do that, you’ll put yourself in the same zone from where you started.
All the progress till now and all the emotional immunity you’ve developed will become zero. You’ll find yourself back on square one.
The idea here is to carve out the best version of you. And maybe you’ll attract someone better in the process.
3. More Than A Year
For those who find themselves thinking a lot about their first love even after a year of separation, have you been making any of the mistakes that we’ve mentioned above?
Chances are you have.
Not letting go of the idea of you and your first love being together can be the biggest reason behind you not being able to move on.
And now you have been making those mistakes for more than a year and made it a part of your routine, a habit.
Thus, you need to shake off whatever unreal fantasies you’ve been harboring and look towards educating yourself. Seek help if you need it.
Talk to extremely close friends, your family, there is no shame in that. And begin dating people. Don’t wait for it to happen. Ask people out.
If the fear of rejection and learning how to approach can take your mind off your first love even for a few hours, then the investment is worth it.
And just to remind you to the point of sounding repetitive, please let go of them. Your first love shouldn’t be the most important person in your life.
And if they are, then you should question what sort of a life it is any way where someone else is more important than you in your own life.
Conclusion
We agree that your first love is a beautiful memory, but does one memory have the right to hamper the moments where we can make even better memories?
That’s what most of us don’t realize. We stand in our own way of creating new memories.
Now tell us about your first love and why you have been thinking so much about them? Also, tell us what are you going to do to move on?
Share your thoughts in the comments!