After five years of hard-core monogamy, my best friend recently put herself back on the dating market. Did she fall out of love? No. Did her (now ex) boyfriend cheat on her? Not quite. Was she afraid of commitment? Not at all. She simply wanted to “see what else was out there.” My gal-pal is a young 23, and this five-year relationship was her first. The problem was, she wasn’t quite sure she wanted it to be her last. It seems to me that we have become more and more wary of sticking to that first love, in fear that the urge to experiment with others will always be in the back of our minds. As my parents’ failed marriage proved to me, happy high school (or college, or grad-school) sweethearts don’t always end up happy life partners. Maybe it's good to do some soul-searching, or spouse-searching, before we settle down. But here’s a perfect example of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t." If we throw away what we have now in hopes that something better—something we haven’t yet experienced—will come along, we might end up regretting it. But if we stay in our first-love comfort zone, we might always wonder. So the question is, should you/would you give up your first love to test the waters? Or in doing so are you throwing something quite valuable, possibly irreplaceable, away?