When Donny Osmond sang about it many years ago, he called it puppy love, but these days it's more often referred to as "crushing" or simply being "into" someone. It's the teenage experience of love, and now there is a book devoted to the subject.

"First Love — The Adolescent's Experience of Amour" was written by University of Alberta nursing professor Dr. Wendy Austin, who believes parents need to take teenage love affairs more seriously.

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Teenage love is often written off as a passing phase by adults, but Austin has discovered there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. She said the experience of young love can have a profound and lasting effect, and for parents to ignore this can make teenagers feel isolated, insecure and lonesome.

For her research, Austin interviewed a number of people about the experiences of love they had as teenagers. She steered clear of talking to young people who were actually involved in love affairs so as not to influence their experience by questioning them.

She said while young people are usually taught all about sex, love is generally not on the agenda. To better understand some teenage behaviors it is, therefore, extremely worthwhile to appreciate what love means to teens and the fact that deep relationships experienced as an adolescent can have lasting effects.

To bring some personal perspective to the research, she also included her own experience of teenage love, recalling a time when she was 13 years old and secretly in love with a neighborhood boy.

Some of the world's great love stories as expressed in movies, songs and literary texts such as "Romeo and Juliet" were also studied as part of the research.

Austin found there are four phases of teenage love: awakening, falling, possession and becoming (self-growth). What was common in all these phases was the almost-uncontrollable force of emotions that led to sometimes-irrational actions in the name of love.

She said the sense of loss that accompanies the end of some teenage romances can be likened to experiencing a death for young people, and the effect of this should not be underestimated.

Studying the effects of Cupid's arrow was a culmination of several years of research that included studying ways health professionals deal with people facing life-changing experiences, Austin added.

Have the memories of your first romance stayed with you all these years? How has that influenced you as a parent? Let us know — we'd love to hear from you!

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