Why You Should Always Love Like You’re 17

When I was 17, I was just starting to learn what it really meant to be scared.

I had just learned what it really meant to lose someone you loved. I was applying to college and realizing that the comfort of the city I grew up in and the home that I had lived in all my life wouldn’t always be mine to grasp on to. I was learning what it meant to become an adult and all the wonderful and terrifying things that come along with that.

I had always been an anxious kid, but my anxieties were finally starting to become grounded in reality into tangible things that I could really be afraid of.

One thing I was absolutely not afraid of was falling in love.

I fell in love pretty much every other week. One conversation with the right person could set off a months-long love affair, even if the majority of it only took place in my imagination. Whoever I was sitting beside on the bus or sitting behind in class or standing in line next to me at a coffee shop was a potential target of my affection.

I confessed my feelings to crushes with little worry of what would come after. And a lot of the time, what came after was a wave of tears and disappointment. My passionate, heartfelt, deeply-overdramatic confessions often led to me sitting in my room, writing passionate, heartfelt, deeply-overdramatic songs on my kid-sized guitar.

(If you read some of the songs that I wrote at that time, you would think that I had been cheated on by my husband of 10 years after I had sacrificed everything for us to be together. In reality, I had just found out that a boy I had spoken to a grand total of three times actually had a girlfriend. He hadn’t thought to mention it to me, as we had only spoken a grand total of three times.)

As messy and huge and overwhelming as my feelings could be at that time, I miss the way that I loved when I was 17. The way that I used to be so sure that the right person was out there that I was willing to encounter all the wrong people along the way. The way that I used to know that someone better must be right around the corner.

I remember sitting with my then-best friend after a particularly difficult heartbreak. As sad as I was, I remember telling her, “If I can love the wrong person that much, just imagine how much more I’ll love the right person.”

Call it overly optimistic, call it naïve, call it whatever you want. I call it brave. I want to be that brave again.

If that still sounds like you, I hope you always love as deeply as you do now. I am in awe of you. And if you’re as scared as the years have taught me to be, that’s okay too. But I hope that you learn how to remember the times when you weren’t so afraid.

Remember the way that you used to love before the world told you that it was wrong.

Remember the way that you used to throw your heart out into the world without worrying whether someone else would catch it.

Remember how you used to fall so hard, shatter your heart into a million pieces, and pick them up the next day, ready to fall in love again.

Remember the person who believed in soulmates and fairy tales and true love. I’m sure that they’re still inside of you somewhere.

Remember the way that you loved when you were 17.