Comment Rescue – First Loves

Glyph

Glyph is worse than some and better than others. He believes that life is just one damned thing after another, that only pop music can save us now, and that mercy is the mark of a great man (but he's just all right). Nothing he writes here should be taken as an indication that he knows anything about anything.

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11 Responses

  1. zic says:

    The first time I met my first love was in church. I was 4, and I went by myself because I thought I should go to church. (It was just a short walk down the street I lived on at the time.) He was, to my 4-year old eyes, beautiful. His father taught the Sunday school classes, and was tall and handsome. His mother helped, and was kind and pretty; they both spoke gently and in a way that seemed to value goodness in people.

    When He was in the room, I found it hard to even speak.

    Which got worse when, the next fall, I started kindergarten, and He was there. That the goodness of His parents had spread to Him was obvious, He was popular, but didn’t participate in the bullying and teasing other kids did. Which endeared Him to me even more.

    Over the years, my devotion never wavered. I was deeply, madly in love. And it showed, everyone in my class of 25 (we went through school, the same basic group, from k to 8) knew I had a hopeless crush on Him. I never really even considered any of the other boys (or girls) as potential for a romance. And of course, my feelings, deep and devoted as they obviously were, were not returned. Others teased me about them, constantly. But He never did; if He didn’t ignore me, He at least spoke kindly and gently.

    Then my life unfolded with it’s horror of a pedophile. I often escaped into fantasies of being loved by Him instead of being loved by an old man in his ’70’s. By the time high school came, I was still deeply devoted, and at least it was something He and I could joke about. He began dating a girl from another town who went to our school; she was also a good person, and I felt happy for Him in that; even it He didn’t love me. As you might expect, I found love in all the wrong places and relationships. I never dated anyone from my school; I suspect I thought it would be a way of being unfaithful; but I dated a few boys my age from other schools, and a lot of men already through high school; a couple in their ’30’s. I was, of course, sexually active; having a pedophile in your life will do that to you. And it was the ’70’s, there was no reason for a girl to hide that or be ashamed of it, so I didn’t.

    One day, on the school bus, He sat down with me. I was shocked. I knew He and his girlfriend were having trouble. He told me that they’d broken up. I asked why. He said she wouldn’t go all the way. And asked if I would.

    “No,” I told him. “I love you. What you’re asking for isn’t love.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it; I wanted to say yes, to convince myself that sex would turn him to love. But I knew better; sex wasn’t love. I didn’t want not-love with Him.

    He married his girlfriend, they had some kids. I, meantime, met my Sweetie, and found true love. My sweetie has many of the same qualities I’d seen in my first love; a gentle way of speaking, refusing to be mean or tease. And so much more.

    Last I heard, my first love and his wife were divorced and he had a drinking problem. This was not from a reliable source, so I hope it’s not true.Report

  2. What a lovely story, if poignant. I am happy for you that you got to share what you did, and the rest can remain more precious for being a mystery.

    And my first love is my husband. Everyone who preceded him in any kind of romantic role in my life was such a disaster in one sense or another that to describe those relationships as “love” would, in retrospect, be ludicrous.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Russell Saunders says:

      “Everyone who preceded him in any kind of romantic role in my life was such a disaster in one sense or another that to describe those relationships as “love” would, in retrospect, be ludicrous.”

      Maybe (make that “probably” or even “definitely”) I have been lucky in love, but though I have experienced romantic disasters and some spectacular flameouts, none were so thoroughgoing as to cause me to retroactively classify those relationships as “not-love”, no matter how ill-advised they turned out to be in retrospect, or how nuclear they ultimately went in the end.Report

      • Russell Saunders in reply to Glyph says:

        Oh, I loved a few, in the manner of passionate, doomed and short-lived relationships. It’s not that I didn’t sincerely “love” anyone before my husband. But since they all flamed out rather spectacularly before any of them turned into the sort of relationship where the actual work of love needed to be done, now that I’ve been in a relationship for a decade it seems laughable to use the same term to describe what I do/feel now to describe any of them.Report

    • North in reply to Russell Saunders says:

      Thanks Doc,
      I don’t really count Morgan as a romantic relationship per say, I loved him, sure and much teenage antics were gotten up to but I can’t honestly say we were ever an item since we literally never talked about that curious aspect of our interactions.

      Ironically my first “date” was with my current husband, 15 some years ago. Good lord, I feel old. I was back 19 then.

      Do you not feel some kind of special memory for your first? A lot of people (myself very especially) say that you never truly get over the first person you are with.Report

      • Russell Saunders in reply to North says:

        You are younger than me, my friend.

        And no, however you might care to define “first,” I have no particularly special memories of any who might arguably claim that title. Nothing that would really give them a claim to specialness. I have a few fond memories of a handful of failed romances, little flickers from when there was still a little bit of magic in them, but nothing more than a bauble or two to juggle in my mind when it’s idle. And not a one that I am not entirely, gratefully over.Report

      • Glyph in reply to North says:

        Shoot, there’s days when I’m not sure I will ever be over ANY of them.

        Not sure if this makes me uniquely romantic, uniquely nostalgic, or uniquely stupid.

        (A: Yes)Report

      • Chris in reply to North says:

        Of the women I’ve dated in my life, there are three whom I will never be over, and I think about them every day. I don’t think this is all that unusual.

        Though the parting with each of them was painful enough that it might have something to do with my thinking about them as often as I do.Report

      • Glyph in reply to North says:

        yeah, maybe “ANY” is a slight overstatement…but there’s 3 to 5 that crop up frequently.Report

  3. Will Truman says:

    Who my “first love” was depends on how you count it. There was the first girl I asked to “go with me” in the fifth grade. That was the first girl I felt anything about with any intensity. Then there was the girl that I became kind of obsessed with for 570 days. The first really intense case where there was some reciprocity came in high school. Nothing officially came of it except a pair of broken hearts.

    I met my first real girlfriend in a rather typical fashion. I worked at a movie theater where she worked. She had a boyfriend at the time, but a mutual friend/coworker figured out our mutual interest (possibly because we each told her) and she set things up just as soon as they broke up. We were together for over four years though it didn’t end well (does any relationship that lasts that long end well?).

    It was all much more epic as I was living through it than in retrospect.Report