The human mind has to come to terms with an entire world as it develops in childhood and adulthood. If you think about how different we are from day one to year thirteen it should not be a surprise that it takes a while for us to understand our own feelings once they kick in in what the catholics delightfully call ‘ the age of reason’, whilst remaining resolutely embarrassed by what the reason is.
Those early loves pail into insignificance to the first people we live with and around, though at the time they feel as if they own our entire existence and one wrong letter or bad dance and our world ends for weeks and months. How those feelings mutate as we grow into them and into ourselves, anyone who had loved at twenty and then again at thirty will tell you the feelings are different. The expectations are different. The rewards are different.
Anyone who has been deeply in love at twenty and again at forty will be able to describe wholly different senses of what love is. And those who marry at twenty and remain together at forty and beyond find in every decade the feelings mature at their own pace, with memory and experience. Love is deep but it is not uniform or a mirror image of itself because the lover changes, the mind evolves over time and everything evolves with it.
love isn’t a constant, but it is consistent.