fickle. adjective. fick· le ˈfik-əl. : likely to change frequently without good reason : inconstant.

Love is a fickle thing. Most of us have experienced the heartbreak of both the giving and receiving end of falling out of love. It’s a confusing feeling to go from planning your life, daily habits, the order of your phone calls around someone, to suddenly not being concerned about their presence at all.

As teenagers we had the pleasure of enjoying puppy love and all of the joys that came with it. The type of love that was equally intense and innocent. Love that somehow simultaneously makes people want to gag and stare. Our first romances made us believe we had met our soulmate. We argued with our parents that yes, our fifteen year old crush would last forever because we just couldn’t imagine a life where we weren’t together. All of the sudden this puppy love made us forget our life prior to being in love. It was this that allowed us to drown in the sweet bliss of infatuation and overdriven hormones.

We are no longer in the stages of puppy love though. We have moved in to something slightly more mature but ten times more damaging, fickle love. Love that can change without warning and reason. We are in our twenties now and we are losing grip of our own identities while trying to build lives with other people. Stress is no longer as simple as a sophomore year math final, it’s much more complex. With life more difficult, it means our love lives are just as troublesome. The days of intense crushes and unquestionable hope are far gone, we have become much more familiar with uncertainty and skepticism.

We fall in and out of love without reason, allowing our heads to turn without a real sense of direction. And we long for something permanent while chasing options we know will only be temporary. Maybe it was the puppy love heartbreak, or maybe it’s the stress that comes with real adult life. But we are lost and continually hurt by this season of fickle love. Yet we still remain in the game, praying that something, someone will stick.