So I am struggling to sleep (no new thing here), so I thought I would read. Ended up reading some Dostoyevsky and this lead me to here and some of my thoughts.
“I want to be with you, to love you the way one loves for the first time, with all the soul”
To me this expresses a longing to love someone with the same purity, awe, and total surrender that comes with a first experience of love. Some lines of writing carry within them an ache, not of sorrow, but of yearning. The quote in question speaks of a desire to love with the same purity and openness that accompanies a first love, untouched by fear or the weight of past disappointments. It hints at the human longing to return to a state where the heart was unguarded, where tenderness came naturally, and where the soul had not yet learned to protect itself.
At its core, the passage captures the moment when another person awakens a sense of possibility. It suggests that love can invite us to soften, to lower the emotional armour we’ve built over time, and to believe, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps bravely, that beginnings are still possible. It is not a denial of past wounds but an acknowledgment that someone’s presence can make us wish those wounds had not shaped us so deeply.
There is also a quiet beauty in the idea of offering the deepest parts of oneself; the unspoken hopes, the fragile truths, the private corners of the spirit. In this sense, the quote becomes a meditation on renewal; the hope that love, when met with gentleness and understanding, can feel new again, and that we, too, might rediscover a version of ourselves left behind.
Ultimately, the sentiment reminds us that a connection can inspire us to love with tremors of innocence, despite everything we’ve lived through. It suggests that the heart remembers how to begin again.
It only needs the right moment, or the right person, to remind it.
Amina xo
Dr Amina Ravat 