Welcome to Ask A MWLTF (Yes, that’s Mother Who Likes to F*ck.), a monthly anonymous advice column from Scary Mommy. Here we’ll dissect all your burning questions about motherhood, sex, romance, intimacy, and friendship with the help of our columnist, Penelope, a writer and mental health practitioner in training. She’ll dish out her most sound advice for parents on the delicate dance of raising kids without sacrificing other important relationships. Email her at askpenelope@scarymommy.com.
My 16-year-old daughter just got her first boyfriend, and I’ve been surprised by how emotional it’s made me. It’s not that I don’t want her to date. It’s that watching her experience the thrill of first love has made me realize how long it’s been since I’ve felt that kind of anticipation in my own relationship. My husband and I still love each other, but our conversations revolve around college visits, who’s driving to soccer, and whether we remembered to pay the orthodontist. I feel guilty admitting that my daughter’s excitement has made me nostalgic for a version of myself I thought I’d outgrown. Is this just midlife talking, or is it normal to miss being swept away?
One of the quiet cruelties of parenting is that your children keep arriving at places you can never return to.
The first day of kindergarten. The first time they drive alone. The first broken heart. The first person they can’t stop thinking about.
As parents, we spend years preparing them for these milestones, but we rarely prepare ourselves for the way those milestones can stir something in us. Watching your daughter fall in love for the first time doesn’t just remind you of being 16. It reminds you of what it felt like to inhabit a world where almost everything was still possible and the future hadn’t settled into a shape yet. Of course you’re emotional.
Long relationships are built on something very different from first love. They’re built on reliability, shared history, and knowing who forgot to pay the orthodontist and who has to pick up the dog food. None of those things are sexy, but they’re the infrastructure of a life. The problem is that after enough years, it’s easy to mistake the absence of novelty for the absence of desire.
We tend to romanticize the intoxicating rush of early love because it feels so alive. But psychologically, that feeling depends on uncertainty. You don’t know whether the other person wants you. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. Your imagination fills in the gaps. That’s exhilarating—but it’s also profoundly destabilizing. Most of us worked very hard to build lives that don’t feel that way anymore.
So when you watch your daughter floating around the house smiling at her phone, she’s not just reminding you of romance. She’s reminding you of a version of yourself that lived with far fewer responsibilities. No wonder it feels like a loss. The challenge now is to not confuse longing for that feeling with longing for a different partner.
The mistake many of us make in midlife is assuming that because we miss feeling swept away, the answer must be someone new. In reality, what we’re often grieving isn’t another person. It’s another self. The woman who was curious, playful, flirtatious, willing to stay out too late because tomorrow didn’t already have a color-coded calendar attached to it.
In other words, maybe the question isn’t how to recreate first love—that’s impossible, and honestly, probably exhausting. The question is whether there’s room in your current life for a little more anticipation. A date that feels like an occasion instead of an obligation. A conversation with your husband that isn’t interrupted by logistics.
Long-term love will never feel as consuming or destabilizing as first love. Thank god.
First love is thrilling because it’s built on fantasy. Lasting love has the potential to be thrilling for a different reason: because every once in a while, after 20 years of thinking you know someone completely, they do something that reminds you they’re still becoming. And so are you.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/parenting/my-daughters-first-boyfriend-has-made-me-nostalgic-for-first-love
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