UKking

I think the feeling can be geniune, despite the cognitive ability not being fully developed.
The feelings are still certainly valid though, whether or not someone at that age has a life that is as complex as an adult's.

Plan9

Sure. Problem? It changes in the next mood swing.

Hormones... what a wonderful thing.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Cynthetiq

No, they have no idea what it means. In fact, I'll even stretch it into high school and college.

The love I have had for my girlfriends is nothing compared to the love I have with my wife in my late 20s.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Charlatan

The love may not compare to the love you know when you are older, but that is just experience and time.

It only stands to reason that the love you felt when you were a teenager is going to be different from what you feel, say, 20 years later. This is owing to personal experience and more time to develop the love you have for someone you've been with for 20 years.

I don't think that devalues the love a teenager feels. It's just different.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

robot_parade

I was going to reply here, but I would just repeat what Charlatan said.

Shauk

experience is experience.

snowy

Even if you haven't been with the same person for 20 years, the love you feel differs from relationship to relationship.

Sure, I was in love with my high school boyfriend, and the boyfriend after that, and the boyfriend I have now. But they were all different, and different degrees of love, and through loving them (or learning not to love them, as the case may be), I changed, and so the love I love for someone else after them will never be the same.

As I've gotten older, and my heart has gotten decidedly more bruised and world-weary, the love I have for my significant other has grown in its depth and breadth, because I realize now what a wonderful thing I have. Junior high kids have nothing to compare their love experience to, but we shouldn't hold that against them.

We should do just as my mother did for me, sort of smile and laugh, and know they'll know what we know someday.

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

allaboutmusic

If you equate being "in love" with purely having feelings, then sure.

Merlocke

I told my high school crush that I loved her 2 weeks into the relationship. She freaked out, but got over it eventually. It's been 12 years since we've started dating, and 4 years since we've been married. Good times. I believe you can feel love at any age - it depends on the maturity of the minds

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-=[ Merlocke ]=-

genuinegirly

Yes. I think they can. They may not entirely grasp it as adults would, but yeah. I think they can. Is it common that they are? Probably not so much.

__________________
"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy

Merlocke

possible yes - common - not so much.

"agrees" with genuinegirly

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-=[ Merlocke ]=-

Sugarmouse

Yes i think anybody can be in love as soon as they are old enough to comprehend the feeling.If anything, love can become more difficult with age as your mind is tainted with the everyday hurdles of living. Its a feeling.

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Sugarmouse=Festered

Plan9

Yes, yes... it seems that true love is washing dirty dishes late at night and paying necessary bills that sap your account; it isn't all this cuddly Hallmark stuff.

Love is the invisible adhesive that holds a couple together during the prosaic, the painful, the conflict.

See... nobody needs love to do anything when times are good and people are happy. The spirits are close, the feelings are mutual.

Love is the variable-strength tie that binds... that which keeps us from immediately running off when something doesn't go our way.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Cynthetiq

and they call it puppy love... -Donny Osmond

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

ametc

I think it's possible, though rare.

When I was in junior high I had a boyfriend for four years or so. I can say that I truly loved him as an adult would love their spouse. Even now, though we've broken up, I can still say that I love him. I have a new boyfriend now, whom I love.. but not the same kind of love that I have for my exboyfriend.

Dolores Haze

"I think the feeling can be geniune, despite the cognitive ability not being fully developed.
The feelings are still certainly valid though, whether or not someone at that age has a life that is as complex as an adult's."

This is precisely why the question invites some scorn on my part, personally--ah, and I do like Crompsin's reply.

The ushy-gushy feelings aren't the hard part of love, and while they are integral they are nigh meaningless on their own. What I find most beautiful about love is its ability to persevere even though adult cognitive function tells us otherwise or steers us away. I don't find purity or innocence beautiful the way that most people seem to---I mean, I do get a fresh, clean feeling when I'm around it the same way I did in grade school when I had a fresh load of school supplies. But appreciation, joy and true contentment comes for me from a page that's been scrawled on, rubbed out, nicked around and wrinkled until the battered words on it shine with the effort and hardship that was put into making them what they are.

When my boyfriend told me two weeks into our relationship that he loved me, I just sort of gave him an affectionate smile and knew full well that it was garbage. Do I doubt he loves me now? No. Did I doubt then that he would ever love me? Nah, not really. We were on the right track, and I knew he would eventually grow to fit his talk.

Before I met him, I had a short tryst with a chronologically older but mentally much younger boy who tootled about on his motorbike and thought Deep Thoughts. We had all the feelings, yes, but his emotional maturity rubbed shoulders with my twelve year old sister's. Things got hard and neither of us really wanted to acknowledge each other's existence anymore. We could have been in love, but not all love is equal in my eyes.

Ustwo

Love is when someone else's happiness is more important than your own.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

frogza

From what I understand the pre-frontal cortex is the part of the brain that governs social interactions and emotional responses. It isn't finished developing until 18-21 years of age.

So can a person be in love, ie. an emotional state that involves close social interactions, when the part of their brain that allows them to do so is still developing? I's say no, at least not in a my-brain-is-capable-of-this kind of way.

highthief

Bingo!

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Si vis pacem parabellum.

Willravel

Love is too subjective for me to give an answer for everyone. I can answer for myself: yes.

little_tippler

I think it's possible...it depends on the person and their maturity level...

I think I was in love when I was about 16, with one particular person...

I am now 27 and I still think about that person occasionally.

I have also been through other experiencesafter that where I thought maybe I was in love and now realize I couldn't have been.

But that one experience at 16...still sticks in my mind.

Mainly because it involved sacrificing my own happiness for him to be happy...

and I also feel that he was someone I totally got and who totally got me...and I only see the value of that now.

Weird stuff.

__________________
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

Fernando Pessoa, 1918

levite

Yeah, I'm also going to have to say it depends on context: who are the kids involved, what are they like, etc. I've been teaching for several years, and I can vouch for the fact that there is absolutely no predicting maturity level by chronological age. The high schoolers I teach range from more together than some of their teachers to "who let you off the playground?"

Granted, you don't get junior high kids who are that together very often, but it happens, and it probably happens more often than we think.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

Hain

We think about them because they were our firsts. No way to get around that. It is like an imprint in the mind- rapid change of chemicals causing all sorts of new experiences.

Despite knowing that, doesn't change the fact I still think about what it might have been like with a girl like my first. I have come to realize that I the woman she became is not someone I can respect as much as back then.

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////\\// IRONSKY.NET \\//\\\\

Plan9

Lemme fix that.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."