Our “first love,” (love being the key word, not crush) can theoretically happen at any age, with anyone, and at any time. For the most part, however, this notorious first encounter occurs around adolescence, when our limbs are still trying to figure out which way they want to grow, our eyes all of a sudden need glasses, and our face is getting our first stamp of hormones -- a pimple.
In the midst of our awkward stage we manage to fall in love. It is as if our external developing bodies are indirectly connected to our internal hearts. Our bodies suddenly become our heart’s personal wake up call to the opposite sex. It is a time full of curiosity with no guidelines or rules. It is the beginning of our adulthood and the foundation for our final love.
On this year’s All Hallows Eve as I made my way from one party to another, my “first love” was raised from his grave. One of the parties I attended that night was a registered BSU party. By the time I arrived I was very cold and very hungry. I scanned the room, caught sight of two Domino’s Pizza boxes, and although I have never been a fan of Domino’s pizza, reached for a slice. As I began to devour my pizza, I heard a voice call out, “Hey baby, come over here so I can holler at you.”
I pride myself on good hearing, but when I heard that remark I had to do a double take. Within minutes the voice appeared beside me, and the pickup attempts began. I informed him that my name was Veronica, I had a boyfriend, and he would be arriving to the party shortly. However, none of that seemed to matter; this guy was not going down without a number, which he eventually received. It just wasn’t mine.
During my frenzy of lies, when asked for my number the first number that came to my mind was my first love’s. I couldn’t believe it. All I could do was sit there on my foldable metal chair, pizza in hand, dictating once familiar numbers to a complete stranger. As I watched the digits magically appear from the press of a button, every press seemed to push me further back in time.
I met my first love when I was very young, still in middle school in fact. Our mothers went to the same gym and every summer we would be dropped off at the gym’s day care. Three hours of every day spent in the room the size of a cubicle. We grew up together and he had been my best friend before anything else. Looking back now I can see that from the beginning we were doomed. We had truly thought that this “first love” we were experiencing was going to be our last.
One Christmas in particular I can recall him and his family coming over to my parent’s house. Our families spent the night talking, laughing, and playing charades. Afterwards, as he was leaving he took me aside and said “I could see this, I can see us and our families doing this every Christmas to come because it feels right.” It is a moment that I will never forget, because it was a statement that was stronger then any “I love you.” He wasn’t just saying I love you; he was saying that he could see his life with me. In the end though, his powerful idealistic view of our relationship didn’t quite match up with the reality of it. A few months later, the relationship came to an end, and with it my first love. Or such was my reasoning prior to this year’s Halloween suitor.
It made me think: How many other women like me have been carrying around their first love without even realizing it? Have we been all this time living our love life by the feelings invoked by our first love, unknowingly judging and perceiving the actions of future men through the actions of our first man?
For a specific amount of time in our adolescence, everything depended on this one person to make us happy, and even through adulthood it seems that he or she managed to stick with us.
Good or bad, “the first” will forever act as our personal measuring stick, rulebook, and weighing scale for “the last” and everyone in between. You may not be aware of it now, but one ordinary day you too will unearth your first love. You will look around at your current love life and suddenly be transported back to the hallway outside your high school lunchroom, a park, a local movie theater, maybe even a school dance, or maybe, a simple Christmas party that happened a long time ago.
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