Monday 17 November 2008

Sam: The pain of first love

I was chatting to a guy at a party the other day and he came up with a great story. (There are some real benefits to being a Love Doctor, either people spill loads of great love related stories, or swear I am really an accountant pretending to be a love doctor as a cheap pulling trick.)

Apparently he had only just got over his first real love. He was in his late 30’s, so was not a quick healer. When he just started University his parents hired a Swedish au pair for one of their younger kids. Blond, beautiful, buxom and apparently very skilled in the bedroom, he as a spotty young Englishman fell madly in love with her. Towards the end of his university degree she decided that she wanted to go back to Sweden and demanded that he come with her. Rationalising that he needed to finish his degree, and perhaps not quite realising how good his first real catch was, he decided to stay and that was that. He never really quite recovered.

Fast forward about 18 years later and bring on the joys of Facebook. She found him, got in touch and dropped him an email saying she had been thinking of him all these years and invited him to come to Sweden. She of course was a bit worse for ware and had a couple of kids in tow from previous boyfriends. Apparently this was enough to unbreak his heart – that she wanted him, and was no longer the glorious goddess that he held in his mind all those years. The relief on his face was something to behold.

First love is one of those things that burns and hurts not quite like any other love you have. And it is strange the things that let you move on. What was your first love? How did you get over it?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got over my first love within a few months. Just finding someone else was what did it. And ten years down the line, looking back on her, I can't believe I ever felt that way in the first place.

Maybe I just didn't know what love really was at the time.

Getting over my current love, THAT is going to be the difficulty...

Anonymous said...

i agree with the first poster, a cute boy in my physics class did it for me. when i looked back, i was very glad we had broken up-change is a very good thing.

badgerdaddy said...

Yep, s'true. My first love wouldn't even speak to me if we ever bumped into each other. I don't feel bad about that, either - it was years ago and it's only important now in so far as it helped us become the people we are, for better or worse.

The pain and ecstasy that that kind of intense relationship brings is difficult to unlearn, I found, and chased that chemical intensity for years. Then I met the woman that I'm now married to, and as she put it: "Everything else [past relationships] seems so... farcical."

I'm rambling. I go now.

Jack said...

It took me maybe 3 years to get over my first love. I had the rose-coloured lenses for quite some time and did not realise the extent to which I was idolizing her.

My best friend had a similar experience as the one posted. He fell head over heels for his older Swedish tutor and after a few months, she had to move back and finish her masters. They tried the long distance thing and it didn't work out. My friend, rather than accept the long-distance break-up, flew all the way to Sweden and broke up with her in person.

I must say, it's a far more magnificent way to break up with someone. Much better than sitting at home and wallowing in self-pity.

Milana said...

I'm not sure that this is strictly speaking a 'first love' scenario, I think it is an 'unfinished business' scenario that just happened to be his first love. We all have them and they can come at any time. Thems the buggers you'll think about on your death bed, just you wait and see...

Anonymous said...

I first fell in love when I was seven years old, for a ten-year-old boy in grade five. An insurmountable gap, of course, but I pestered him and swung on his arms and went around pressing the Enterprise's self-destruct button when he was playing Star Trek (he was Kirk, naturally). His teacher, my mother, was a mentor to him and so he kept in touch with our family in a Christmas-card way over the next few years.

I found him on Facebook about a year ago and we met for a coffee. I faintly remembered a lanky, olive-skinned kid with a brilliant smile. He was short, pudgy, with a dull voice and a face I wouldn't have looked twice at. His political views are best described as Republican. (I'm a socialist.) Yeah, the magic's gone.

Lily Lane said...

It took me just over two years to get over the boyfriend I had for only 6 months when I was 16. After having terrible drunken sex with him in a bathroom toilet when I was 18 and a half on one of the most traumatic nights of my life and losing one of my closest friends at the time because of it, I decided that we could no longer be friends, and visited to tell him exactly that. I had feared that I might fall back into my feelings and retract my decision, but miraculously I have never once looked longingly back.

Anonymous said...

Still haven't got over it - nearly 4 years on now, and I know it's utterly wrecking my chances of meeting someone else, but I can't believe I'll never see her again - and to be honest, wouldn't want to if we can't get together again. Seriously, I would give all my possessions to be able to take a pill to forget she ever existed.

Anonymous said...

It took me ages to get over my first love and even now I still go down to the cellar to talk to her, but less so these days.