How to Stop Falling In Love With All Your Hookups.

⚠️TW: mention of sexual assault⚠️

The person I lost my virginity to became my partner in the longest relationship I’ve ever had.

That creates quite the strong bond, especially when the other person was also a virgin. After much anxiety and anticipation and “I love you”s, our collective first time was… good. Not memorable enough to be magical, but a good experience nonetheless. The seven months that followed in that relationship made me think I would never need anyone else- sexually or romantically- and I fell in love.

This partner almost moved away with me when I went to college. We went on beach trips, worked together, spent all our time with each other. So when we separated after he sexually assaulted me, there was an enormous hole in my heart. I wanted so desperately to fill the space he’d left, to find someone as intimate and important as he was to me. In the beginning of college, I latched onto the first boy who showed interest in me and began to spend all my time with him, romanticizing everything about him. I knew he liked me, too, but not as much as I craved his attention. I started spending every night in his dorm and got attached within the first week. Needless to say, it ended badly (after he sexually assaulted me).

Now, I was really in a desperate place. I needed yet another boy to pick up the pieces of my broken heart and cradle me close. And- you guessed it- I found one. Cue the cycle: spend all your time together, be reassured that he will never hurt you, sleepover in his dorm almost every night, become friends with his friends, and then get heartbroken when he decides the relationship is too much to handle. I don’t blame him. He’s just an eighteen year old kid like me who wanted to have fun.

I was ruining relationships by searching for a replacement for what my partner had given me. You can’t find that level of trust, love, and intimacy in a hookup or short-term relationship, no matter how much I tried to force it. Every person (male or female) that I hooked up with in college became the subject of my extensive daydreaming, pretending that they were my fresh start. None of them ever were.

All right, enough talking about myself. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you want to know how to avoid this vicious, painful cycle? I have the answer for you:

HEAL FROM YOUR PAST RELATIONSHIP(S).

There is no way you can stop latching onto every new person unless you allow yourself the time to let that hole close up in your heart. Even if someone distracts from the hole for a couple of weeks, eventually you will find that your expectations for the relationship are unrealistic. Moving too quickly only wrecks the precarious balance of new partnerships. Trust me.

This advice wouldn’t have helped me in college because I was not ready to hear it. It was only after I broke down sobbing one night, realizing how much I missed my ex partner, that I knew I needed more time before I could truly move on. We even tried to work on a new start and hooked up when I came back home for breaks, but it was never going to be a healthy relationship again. It can be really difficult to move on from strong bonds, and it will take time; but if you’re patient enough with yourself, you will heal. And it will only create positive, healthy attachments in the future.