Perpetuated and kept alive by Shakespeare’s famous play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there has long been a belief that who you dream about in the middle of summer is your true love.
Folks, it’s around the middle of summer – whose face has been haunting your dreams?
Love is an integral part of being young, of youth. Like learning, love is a lifelong journey. Learning to love oneself, learning to love others – that’s perhaps the most universal theme of youth.
Everyone has that embarrassing and childish first romance, the wild ups and downs of teenage crushes, then, at some point, that first real love.
Summer and love go together hand in hand, maybe because of some deeply ingrained remembrances of old solstice festivals of courtship and fertility, but maybe simply because the longer days mean it’s easier to wait up after work and watch the sunset with a partner.
Summer sunsets are the most beautiful, in my opinion.
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I dream constantly in the summer and am confident in my midsummer dreams. I have never been in love like I am right now, and the summer has made my heart more full than I thought possible.
Like I said, learning and love go hand in hand, and learning the different seasons of love is maybe my favourite lesson.
Yes, there is definitely an appeal about cuffing season, when people get together right before winter. Perhaps that, too, is an old instinct, some deep part of ourselves asking for someone to keep us warm on long walks in the snow.
But, also, it could be that we want someone to bring to all of those awkward holiday parties and family gatherings.
Autumn love is soft and easy, and flows into winter so easily one hardly notices the change.
But spring. Spring and summer are wild. Those are the days and nights that have been the subject of a thousand romance movies.
The teenager sneaking out the window to go to a party with their partner, the first kiss under the bleachers at the big game, everything. It all happens in summer.
I’m a strong believer in summer love. I believe that the person I dream about at the peak of the summer is my true love, whatever true love is supposed to be. I believe in love, now that I really know what romance can be.
Summer love, for me, is late nights, soft music, shared food, a soft nap.
To be young is to be freely in love – entirely in love.
I think maybe that quintessential sort of young love, the kind in the movies, the kind you’re supposed to have in the summer as a teen, I think that sort of love is over once you’ve had your heart broken. And, sadly, that break comes eventually, the same way that eventually we grow up and grow old.
The trick, I suspect, is to get your heart broken by the right person, so you can grow old with the right person.
Imagine that – a whole lifetime of summers in love.
Marlowe Evans is a student at the University of New Brunswick from Maple Ridge who writes about youth issues.