Aaron thought leaning on his girlfriend would help him cope, but instead, it pushed her away. Struggling with his mental health, he turned to her for constant reassurance, sending frantic messages whenever he felt overwhelmed. At first, she tried to be there for him, but the weight of his needs became too much. When she finally pulled back, he felt abandoned while she wrestled with guilt, caught between caring for him and protecting her own well-being.
Aaron’s story is one of many that journalist and SUNY New Paltz professor Lisa Phillips encountered while researching for First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), her exploration of how young relationships shape mental health, which was released in February. “Every teen relationship story is also a mental health story,” the Woodstock-based author writes. “I was struck by how many of my subjects either went through significant mental health problems while in relationships or tried to take care of partners in crisis.” Love, especially young love, profoundly impacts well-being, for better or worse.
Phillips describes her own love life before meeting her now-husband as “messy, characterized by boom-bust cycles of passionate beginnings followed by disappointment that left me, as I wrote in my book Unrequited, obsessed and desperate.” The emotional toll of dating, she writes, deeply affected her well-being. These experiences ultimately shaped her career, leading her to explore love and relationships in her SUNY New Paltz course, Love and Heartbreak, and resulting book project, First Love.
But “this is what we do as a species,” Phillips writes. “Romantic love, attachment, and lust form the triad of mating drives that evolved to sustain the human race. Relationships are fundamental to what makes us human” and central to health. And it goes beyond self-experience. “They become a part of what knits the world together,” she says. Love can be a source of deep connection or emotional turmoil. In this complex experience of love and heartbreak, Phillips asks an essential question in First Love: How can young relationships become a foundation for self-growth, resilience, and lasting well-being?
Love as a Verb
Phillips emphasizes that love isn’t just something that happens—it’s something people actively do. This concept, thinking of love as a verb rather than a noun, aligns with the idea presented in her book of “love-life literacy”—the ability to navigate relationships with awareness and intention.
“Learning about healthy relationships and what makes relationships unhealthy is liberating,” Phillips says. “It makes love less daunting and more hopeful.” Viewing love as an active practice to develop, she argues, gives people tools to thrive. “You can express care, take responsibility, and advocate for yourself. You actively cultivate your relationship.”
Heather Bissett, a SUNY New Paltz student, has been with her partner, Mars Weigley, for over two years. The couple took Phillips’s Love and Heartbreak course together and say it made them reexamine how they approach their relationship. “Practicing love as a verb means actively listening when one of us needs to vent, showing appreciation through little acts of care, and making time for honest conversations,” the Student Art Alliance president says. “It’s about being willing to apologize, forgive, and grow together. It’s a work in progress, but it’s progress that feels meaningful.”
Phillips admits that researching and interviewing for First Love taught her valuable lessons about her own marriage. “Listening to young people talk about how they worked together and saw love as a verb was really inspiring,” she says. After spending four years talking to people about love, she felt she needed to practice what she preaches. It reminded her to keep putting in the effort—to show up in her own relationship.
Identity and First Love
First love is rarely just about two people—it’s about the worlds they come from. For Bissett and Weigley, love means navigating very different upbringings: one in a conservative Christian household, the other in a queer-affirming family. “Mars being nonbinary and from such an affirming family has given them a lot of confidence in who they are, which I admire,” Bissett says. “For me, growing up as a lesbian in a conservative Christian family made me feel like I had to hide parts of myself. It’s been a journey of unlearning shame and embracing who I am, and my partner’s support has been huge in that process.”
Phillips highlights how gender, sexuality, race, and culture shape relationships. Minority stress—the strain of navigating societal biases—can put additional pressure on relationships. “It creates an island effect,” she says. “They may feel pressure to hang on to the relationship longer or suffer more when it ends because they lost their shelter in the storm.”
But identity can also enrich relationships. While researching First Love, Phillips noticed some queer-identifying survey respondents only shared experiences with opposite-gender partners. Curious, she asked one young woman, “Why did you say you were queer?” The reply: “Well, that’s what I am.”
“That was a real epiphany for me,” Phillips says. “I found that surprising and then incredibly liberating. I’d been carrying this sense of loss about my bisexuality because I’m married to a man, and most of my partners have been male. But I realized I didn’t lose anything—this is just how my life went, and there’s nothing wrong with it.” Just because she hadn’t been in a long-term relationship with someone who wasn’t male didn’t make her any less bisexual. It was an opportunity to reclaim her identity.
The Role of Community
Love may feel intensely personal, but it’s shaped by community. Friends, family, and mentors act as a kind of relationship scaffolding, reinforcing—or sometimes warping—how individuals understand and experience relationships. “Our friends have been such a solid support system. They offer advice, comfort, and a listening ear when things get tough,” Bissett says. “Our community has helped us grow and heal in ways we probably couldn’t have managed on our own.”
For some, like Bissett, who credits her mom with teaching her how to love, family offers a model of love. For others, it complicates it. “Growing up in a toxic household, I find it hard to fall in love,” says Shay Revenew, a digital media production student at SUNY New Paltz who bought Phillips’s book after a meet-the-author discussion at the university. “I was drawn to First Love in the hope it could give me some insight into how to get over that feeling.”
Phillips encourages parents to foster open conversations about love early on. “You can’t interrogate your kids about their relationships, but you can normalize discussions about love,” she says. “If you start when they’re young—commenting on relationships in movies or books—it signals that love is important and worth talking about.”
Phillips opens First Love with a story about her daughter, reflecting on how she tried to prepare them both for her daughter’s future love life. When her daughter was a toddler, Phillips read her The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch (1980), the story of a princess who rescues her prince from a dragon, only for him to scold her for wearing a paper bag after the dragon burned her dress. She dumps him and dances off alone. “My daughter memorized the princess’s kiss-off line, gleefully shouting along as I read, ‘You look like a real prince, but you are a bum!'” Phillips writes. The message was clear: Be brave and devoted in love, but if your sweetheart isn’t deserving, walk away. “I made getting ready for romantic love a priority because I knew it mattered,” she writes.
Still, when her daughter actually started dating, Phillips found herself flustered. She worried about whether her daughter was spending too much or too little time with her new boyfriend, coordinated with his mother to set consistent expectations for both families, and enforced a strict “bedroom-door-stays-open” policy. Despite all her preparation, she realized love—even as a parent—is always a bit unpredictable and a meaningful rite of passage.
How Dating Has Changed
“Every major marker of adulthood is getting pushed later—getting a driver’s license, first job, moving out, having sex, dating seriously,” Phillips says. “For most young people, it’s trial and error, and the fact that it’s happening less means we are in a culture of cower” rather than exploration. This includes relationships and love.
Phillips points to the rise in social media, dating apps, and the always-on nature of digital connection as rewiring how modern relationships begin, develop, and fall apart. She says many date less seriously, delay major milestones, and prioritize personal growth over romance. “Some young people feel relationships are optional rather than essential to well-being,” she says. “But while self-growth outside a relationship is valuable, a lot of personal development happens within relationships, too.”
The Value in Heartbreak
Heartbreak, while painful, is also a powerful teacher, Phillips says. She suggests that experiencing and processing relationship loss is essential for emotional growth. “Making mistakes is everything,” she says. Even if you make mistakes—or, more likely, when you do—you can learn from them. And learning, in love, means growing.
Revenew sees this in her own experience. “One moment you’re so in love, and the next, it feels like the world is ending,” she says. By reading First Love, she was able to reframe loss and begin to see that pain, no matter how overwhelming, is temporary, and this strengthened her skills of perseverance, self-discovery, and the ability to sit in discomfort.
What We Can Learn from Young Love
Young love isn’t just a personal milestone—it’s a microcosm for how people understand intimacy, trust, and self-worth that sets the stage for every relationship that follows. “First Love validated the struggles of young love, especially when you’re dealing with things like identity, family dynamics, and mental health,” Bissett says. “The book made me feel less alone in my experiences and more hopeful about actively building something strong and genuine.”
Love, as First Love explores, is fundamental to the human experience. Understanding it as a skill, rather than just an emotion, allows for healthier, more intentional relationships—whether they last a lifetime or just long enough to teach an important lesson. “That gives people a sense of their own efficacy in the world,” Phillips says, “and that’s got to be good for our well-being.”
Phillips leaves us with this thought: Love, at any age, is a process of becoming. First love, with all its highs and heartbreaks, is just the beginning.
This article appears in April 2025.
