Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 10:02 am
Last modified on
Oscar Wilde was a man who appreciated youth.
"I am not young enough to know everything," he famously said.
"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable," reads The Picture of Dorian Gray.
"Youth is wasted on the young," he lamented.
Cherie Burbach, a friendship expert on About.com and contributor to LifeGoesStrong.com, has also discovered an appreciation for youth. "If you look back on your dating life with regret over some of the people you dated," she says in a recent post, "it's time to change that perspective. Making mistakes when you're in your 20s and 30s is natural, especially when it comes to your dating life." And when all is said and done, "some of the those 'oops' moments are precisely what make you a smarter dater today."
So what can you learn from your youth?
Let go of regrets. So what if you once fell for someone who didn't feel the same way about you? You surrendered to romance and threw caution to the wind, and it just didn't work out. Unrequited love is the stuff of revered Shakespearian sonnets, not something that should be a source of embarrassment or regret. "Maybe you weren't reading things correctly at the time," writes Burbach, "or you 'lived in your head' a little too much, but I'll bet that after you got turned down, you paid more attention to your relationships." The insight you gained from the experience probably helped you choose your partners more wisely in the future.
Lost time can still teach you a valuable lesson. When you were younger, you may have thought that a bad relationship would somehow naturally work itself out. Maybe you stayed with someone who was self-destructive, or with someone who treated you poorly, or with someone who didn't take the relationship as seriously as you did. Looking back, you regret that you spent so much time in a relationship that was doomed to fall apart. But look on the bright side: "Staying in a bad relationship taught you about recognizing the good relationships." Once you understood what a relationship with no future looked like, you were better able to identify - and steer clear of - those relationships afterwards.
Lingering over "what might have been's" is not a wise use of your time. Somewhere along the line, you probably think you missed out on a romantic opportunity. For whatever reason, you let a potential relationship slip through your fingers and now you find yourself wondering What if? "Take comfort in the fact that if it was meant to happen, it would have," Burbach advises. "It doesn't matter that you didn't take a chance, because the reality is that you might have taken a chance and it still wouldn't have worked out." Every mistake is an invaluable lesson, and the past belongs in the past.
"To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies," said Wilde. But maybe they weren't follies after all.