Of course, you will fall in love. Falling in love is a part of dating. In fact, most young people fall in and out of love several times during their teen years. It’s normal to grow fond of members of the other sex with whom you associate and share interests and have good times.
Learning to love and to be loved is an important part of growing up. But it can be confusing. When love feelings come so rapidly, so often, and with so many expressions, how is a girl or a boy to know how to behave? How do you handle these strong feelings? What happens when your heart is broken and love is lost? How do you recover from love’s hurts? And, most important of all, how can you know when you are really in love—enough to make plans for the future?
NOT ONCE BUT MANY TIMES
Each of us loves many, many persons in many different ways during a lifetime. We start by loving our mothers and the other members of our families while we are still infants. We move on to love our playmates. And then we love anyone who is nice to us. As we get into the second decade of life, loves come and go in kaleidoscopic profusion as we find ourselves drawn to many other persons of our own and the opposite sex.
The evidence is that the average teen-age girl falls in love with about a half-dozen boys before she finds the man with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life. This is not to suggest that girls are emotional athletes, nor that either sex is to be considered fickle. It simply means that falling in and out of love is part of growing up.
NOT ONE BUT MANY KINDS
Love is “a many-splendored thing” indeed. In fact there are so many different kinds of love that any listing of them is inadequate and incomplete. Love means so many different things to so many people that no one person can know all of its forms. Yet there are enough universal love feelings that are generally experienced to impress one with the variety of forms love has.
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