Tell Me About Your First Love...

In My Humble Opinion
1

Preface: I just got my heart broken/broke the heart of my first love (still trying to figure out exactly who did the breaking here.) I know my problem is pretty mundane and pointless as things go, but it does hurt like hell right now.

I’ve been lurking here for a long time and I always derive a lot of inspiration from everyone’s stories of life experiences. So I thought I’d be brave and elicit some.

I’d kind of like to hear about your first love, and what went wrong, and (hopefully) why you’re a stronger person because of it. And if possible, it’d be nice to hear that it all worked out for the best for everyone and made it possible for you to go on to have wonderful meaningful relationships and stuff like that. And that it never works out with your first love. Or not, if that wasn’t true for you. Mostly I just want to hear stories that aren’t my own right now :frowning:

2

My first “love” was when I was 15 until the time I was 17 and a half.

We met because a mutual friend called me up and asked me to be in a band with him. This other guy was the guitar player. I thought he was cute, shy, quiet… all that stuff I like. Simultaneously, he looked tough. He had a mohawk and wore lots of spiky things, but he still looked like a big softy to me.

We got together, and it was fun. Hanging out with our friends, kissing whenever we could manage without being seen, playing our music, playing video games.

Gradually it got more serious. Although he had taken a whole month after we got together to kiss me, it moved pretty fast from there. I thought I was in love, and he thought he was too. I’m not saying now that we were not, all I am saying is that we were sure at the time. We’d always talk about getting a dog, getting married, the bands we’d play in when we grew up together, and all that stuff. We were probably only 16 at this time but we were certain that it was going to be forever!

Our friends, at the time, were just getting into drinking. We didn’t want to drink, so we didn’t hang out with them anymore. This is where the trouble started. He took this opportunity to control me, and I let it happen without even really realising what was going on. Eventually, I was at his house every night, and I’d call him as soon as I got home and stay on the phone with him until I went to bed.

If I wanted to go with our friends (who had really become just my friends), he’d make up an excuse as to why he couldn’t go, and then whine until I stayed in with him.

Then we got the Internet at my house, and he’d get angry with me for going on IRC without him because I was probably talking to other boys.

We would always get in fights, and he wouldn’t let me leave his house. His excuse was that he lived in a bad neighbourhood and I would get beaten up. This was actually true. But he would grab me, throw me around, sit on me, hold me down… I was covered in bruises and lying about their origins. So it would have been better for me to walk through the bad neighbourhood and possibly get beaten up than it would have been to stay in and definitely get beaten up!

One day, he went out hunting with his cousin and his dad. I had nothing to do, so I went to a buffet with some friends of mine and their parents. It was fun and I realised how much I had missed being with my friends. When I got home, I went to his house. He had been back from hunting for over an hour and was calling me. He laid in the darkness, face down in a pillow. He had me in the room with him, wouldn’t let me turn on a light, wouldn’t let me turn on the TV, wouldn’t let me leave. I stayed like this for three hours. Silence and darkness.

Another day, he was offended that I wouldn’t wait three hours at school for him when I lived a 20 minute walk away and wanted to go home. He picked up my bookbag and hit me in the face with it. It contained my physics book, which was thick and heavy, and hit me in the lip. I said, “I wish this was bleeding so you could see what you’ve done to me,” and I left.

Amazingly, this was not the end! The real end came a week or so later. We went to the mall, and for some reason I don’t remember, he called me a bitch. I said I wasn’t going to take that and that I was leaving and not coming back. I left the mall, and walked the 40-minute walk to another mall, with him behind me almost all the way. If I looked back and saw him, I’d run. Eventually he got the hint and caught a bus home.

He tried to talk to me in school various times after that. I just turned up my walkman and sang, pretending not to hear him.

He became heartbroken and whined and cried and turned to drugs and alcohol. He called me every day begging me to take him back. When he finally realised it wasn’t going to work, he then badmouthed me to everyone. He said I was “worthless and stupid, but a good fuck” (um, I was your ONLY fuck, so what is your basis for comparison?) and that I was a slut (yes, being your girlfriend for two and a half years, and only having sex with one person makes me a HUGE slut). He made a “Skanks of the Month” webpage, and I was number one on the list!

He eventually had a kid (with a girl he’d been calling a slut and a skank the whole time I was with him), and became a taxi driver like his dad.

I am 24 now, and I live across the country. I still hope never to see him again. But those friends have remained true-blue and I still have them!

I have had awesome relationships since, this is true. I just have a hard time trusting people, and I have some serious self-esteem issues. I am unsure if it’s related to my first experience with love. I have had three near-saintly boyfriends since then, and even though two of those relationships ended in breakups, I would never call them unsuccessful. One of those, I have lost touch with except for a message board, I still read his posts and he’s still funny. I’d like to contact him one day, just in a friendly manner. Another one was my best friend before we dated, he was my best friend while we dated, and he is still my best friend now. Those two breakups were my fault. I treated them badly.

The third, I am still with, and very much in love. I will try not to go down the same route as the other two. We shall see what we shall see!

I hope this helps. Sorry you’re having a tough time.

3

Dr. Memory’s Rule #3. " Good things Don’t last.

Rule #4 " Better things come along"

Carry on.

4

She lived at an orphanage and I was from the best side of town. She broke up with me saying there was too many differences between us. Broke my heart. After high school we actually started dating again when we were home from college. I met someone else but we kept in contact. Then the day I graduated I got a letter from her saying she was married.

About 6 months ago, I got in touch with her (with my wife’s approval). Her husband had died of cancer about 5 years ago. She said that she was testing me back in high school and thought I agreed with her conclusion. She also said that I’d written her and asked her to marry me, just after she got married. To my knowledge I didn’t do anything like that, but it seemed to make her feel good, so no harm is done in letting her think I did. Her husband had seen a letter from me and every time he got jealous he’d ask her if this was a “kniz” thing.

5

Met her in high school. We were 15.

Now we’re 47 and still married.

6

We met at the ballpark in 1973…I was 13 and she 12. I had just come off the field after a game and my sister walked up to me and said she wanted to introduce me to someone. I glanced to her right and saw a girl with a bright smile and a sparkle in her eyes. No girl had ever looked at me like that. We instantly connected.

She was the first girl I ever held hands with, the first girl I ever kissed. We talked on the phone for hours…we were in love. We imagined our marriage and our children…it was sweet.

Our relationship continued on and off over the next 3 years, mostly on, but complicated by the fact that she moved out of the school district.

The last time we were together was July, 1976…and a picture of us was taken by her mother. After that day our lives went different directions and we lost touch. I married in 1981 and raised a family for the next 20 years.

In 2002 my marriage was in divorce and had been broken up for a year. I was lonely and ready to find someone else to love.

One day while surfing the net one of those annoying pop-up ads for Classmates dot com came up. For some reason in an instant I thought of her. I did some investigation and came up with her phone number. I had heard she was on her second marriage and I wasn’t sure if I should contact her. I struggled with it for 2 days and then called. no answer. I froze when the machine picked up and hung up the phone.

The next day I convinced myself to try one more time and I dialed the number. She answered.

Turns out she was divorced. We talked for 5 hours that night and 7 the next night. The night after that I went to her.

We kissed and all of those old feelings came flooding back for both of us. She had kept a place for me in her heart for years. She still had that 1976 photo and my last love letter. She said that I was her dream come true.

We’ve been together every day since…we now live together, are engaged, and will marry next month.

7

Ah yes, first love. I remeber it well, unfortunatley. I was 18.
We met through some new friends of mine and I was attracted to her immediately, even though she was slightly overweight. It didn’t take lone before we were kissing for the first time. We were inseperable and we fit together like a good glove. Soon enough we were having sex, good sex and a lot of it.
The sad truth is I don’t remember many of the good times, but I sure as hell remember the bad. I think I noticed somewhere around our first year anniversary that she was controlling me. We would go to the store to buy chips, I would pick a bag but she would insist I get another type. That is a small example and doesn’t seem to matter except that it happened all of the time. What I wanted, no matter how small or insignificant, wasn’t important to her. But hey, we were having sex, and a lot of it.
I also discovered that she was lying, and a lot. She would make up fabulous stories about what life was like before we met. There was a guy who was in the mob who controlled her and with whome she had two children. She was raped at gunpoint by a friend of her fathers. Then she lyed about stuff during our relationship. That there was a guy forcing her to have sex with him on a regular basis.
The end came very suddenly. Aboout two years in I had just gotten home from work and called her, as I usually do, and she basically said “I don’t love you any more.”
It turns out she had, through an early Canadian version of the internet, met and started an online relationship with a 35 year old mechanic named Richard who lived in Montreal. She eventually moved there to live with him and I had a nervous breakdown.
She would call me once and awhile, just to keep her fingers in me. She even invited me to visit her, which I did. We rented a motel room and had lots of sex for a weekend. The next time I saw or heard from her, about six weeks later, she said she was pregnant and it was mine.
We lost touch with each other, and she eventually moved back home and she eventually called me. I asked about the baby. First she said it had died but it was a girl. Later she said it survived and this Richard person had custody. We had sex again, she dug her fingers in again and finally I said enough.
It killed me inside but I stopped taking her calls and shut out all communication between the two of us. Eventually she stopped calling, eventually I stopped waiting for her calls.
Years passed, we would bump into each other once or twice in a mall, at a mutual friends house, and each time the feeling for her were just as strong. As of this time I haven’t talked to her since I’ve been married, a good eight years, but I still think of her.
Of course to make matters worse I discovered that she had posted her story on a website for people who were considering gastric bypass surgery. In her story she said she had dated a guy briefly in high school, but he dumped her because she was too fat. So the lies continue.
She is married now, with two kids. I sometimes wonder if she thinks of me, but then realise it would just be better if she didn’t.

8

I’m gonna get mushy and puddle-eyed here at work. Wait a second while I go close the door.

My first love was at age 16. I’ll call her Marian because I’d like to keep her real name private. We were hot and heavy and on 27 October 1965, we mutually lost our virginity on a wonderful afternoon in her bedroom. We made plans out the wazoo for college and marriage after graduation and kids, etc.

On 23 December 1965, Marian and her parents were killed in a car wreck by a drunk driver.

I still love her.

9

You mean the part where the pimply lovesick teenage boy finds out that the girl he’s about to ‘ask out’, who he’s spent years hanging around with and doing everything with, is sleeping with a guy in his 20’s who works at the deli she works at?

Or the part where she comes to visit the boy (now a young man, but still stupid in this matter) years later, runs his car into a parked car on the way home from the job she just got fired from for showing up drunk (wasn’t hard for the cops to follow the trail of radiator fluid to the apartment), and the young man spends his last dime putting her on a plane to get her the hell out of there for both their sakes?

Or the part, years after that where she finally professes her love for him after all these 17 or so years? But he’s moved on?

This one just wasn’t in the stars. I hope she’s ok, but I’m afraid she’s not. A beautiful, artistically gifted, brilliant girl who had the misfortune of being in a fucked up family. I didn’t help matters, either. Sad all around.

10

Great thread.

I typed a long story about mine… but then it felt too personal.

Let’s just end with… She’s married to a Microsoft millionare. And I’m not. :slight_smile:

11

Doug’s Corollary: “They don’t last either.”

12

It ended badly.

13

My first love lasted four years, and he became, slowly, physically and emotionally abusive, which is why I left him. Even if it hadn’t been for the abuse, one of the things people on the outside kept mentioning was the fact that we weren’t moving forward at all - we’d been engaged for nearly the entire four years (he’d asked me to marry him three months into the relationship), and we were still living with his mother, he had no job and lived off of my money, and he had some mighty big intentions about being a “full time student”. So the relationship was pretty stagnant even without the abuse, and there was no reason in the world for me to stay. It took me a year to break it off because of my fear of him.

My second relationship was somehow a million times worse than the first, because I was so madly, deeply in love. I was with my soul mate, my one true love. He was my reason for living, being, breathing, all that good stuff. He claimed he felt the same. We were engaged, and he bought me the biggest rock I’d ever seen in person. He lived out here in Seattle, and we began working on all the proper paperwork to bring me into the country (I am from NB, Canada). Our times together were always thrilling, we played off of each other so easily, had fun, laughed, great sex, and were just desperately in love. Our arguments set forest fires and ended in wild sex. Hated being apart. Sparks went off all over the place when we were together. He called me up one night and told me how much he loved me, and how he couldn’t wait until I was there with him, forever and ever.
The next day he broke up with me. Out of the blue.
For another woman.

But you know what? Here I am today. I am a much stronger person because of my struggles, my heartache, the disgraceful way I took the news. I met a man who helped put the pieces back together. I made him jump through some hoops of fire to get there, though. He was my best friend. I had no romantic ideas about him whatsoever while he helped me. I learned that with my friends and family, I’d be okay, and that I could stand on my own if I needed to. I was invited out here to Seattle by my best friend to take a break, since I’d just quit my job, and I was stressed out about other areas of my life. Seattle sounded like a wonderful vacation. Obviously, I’d been here before and I loved it, and I wouldn’t let my ex-fiance sour it for me. So I thought what the hell. I needed it. I’d earned it. I learned more about my best friend during that time, how much he’d been through that had been similar to my experiences (I knew both of his exes, and I’d known they were bad news, but didn’t know a lot of the details). On Christmas Day, he presented me with a ring (agh, not another one of those!), and I found out he’d actually been in love with me since the day he’d met me, several years before. He was my ex-fiance’s best friend when I met him. Well, not anymore! I needed time to think about it, extended my vacation and allowed him to “court” me for a bit, and I realised I really did love this man. It wasn’t the sparks flying, heart pumping, desperate need for each other kind of love, but it was love. And it was deep. I trusted this guy. He moved heaven and earth to keep me feeling safe and happy and loved. He even accomodated my cat :wink:

We’ve been happily married for a year and a half now, with no signs of letting up anytime soon. We rarely argue and love most of the same things, with a few differences thrown in to keep things interesting. We’re both reasonable and honest. We’re also both tired; neither of us wants to play the dating game anymore. He still makes me feel like a queen. I know for certain I make him feel the same way. Well, maybe not like a queen, but pretty royal, anyway. I’m positive that both of our past bad experiences has enabled us to be that much more appreciative of what we’ve got today. The negative past pops its head into our relationship often, just to accentuate the positive. Sometimes he’ll do something for me, and in mild wonderment I think to myself, “No one has ever done that for me before!” And I will give him an unexpected hug and kiss of thanks. Little things I do around the house or whatever sometimes makes my husband a little misty-eyed, because he will think, “She wouldn’t do this if she didn’t care for me.” A few weeks ago, I slipped a little note in his pocket, just saying thanks for something he’d picked up for me. I got a phone call from him while he was at work, and I picked up the phone to hear him say to me, “I love you. I love you. I love you. I found your note. I love you so much.” If it hadn’t been for the bad, bad past, these moments very probably would not happen. (we’re not overly sappy and teary eyed all the damn time, just giving examples!)

I’ll be 27 this year. My first love happened when I was 18. A lot can happen in a short time span. Nine years, three very serious, “long-term” relationships. I don’t know what the future holds, I just know that I will be okay.

14

We met in high school (my junior year, her senior) when we both volunteered at a haunted house. The first few days of the haunted house featured frequent flirtings - the next week, a number of cues were missed because we were making out in the back.

We were together for almost a year, but the last few months we were finding more and more things that didn’t really work between us and broke up in a fairly painless way. We got back together for a couple months a couple years later, but that was mostly a “well, we know we’re not going to end up together, but since we’re both single right now why don’t we fool around a bit?” kind of thing. That ended when she met a new guy, who she ended up marrying a couple years later (and divorcing after about 5 years). We keep in touch and are still friends - she supposed to stay with me next month, when she visits D.C. for a show.

Overall - it was a good relationship to have had, even though it ended.

15

My own story begins back in high school, when due to the inherent highschoolness of high school students and the failure of some abortive crushes I had in middle school led me to build a very thick wall around myself. I took virtually no part in the social part of high school, I suppose given that I’m still friends with I could have had a girlfriend or two, but c’est la vie. So. I go to the 2 day orientation session during the summer before I start college, and I meet the only female physics major at that session. Crash goes the wrecking ball through the walls I had so carefully constructed. As the first semester wore on, I became increasingly infatuated. When I discovered she was already seeing someone else, this did not deter me. I convinced myself that just being in love with her was enough. Two months I was in what I did not realize was my own private little hell. The final straw was when I went to see a performance of the student choir she was in, and her boyfriend was of course there. I walked home from that event in tears. That night, talking to a friend of mine, he helped me realize what I had actually done to myself, and I apologized in advance before completely severing contact with the object of my affection.

Now, jump back about a month, this is when I started talking to a different girl. We had discussed various topics on and off, and it wasn’t until after I broke out of the self made Prison of Unrequited Love that I paid any attention to this new girl who went to a different school, back in NYC, 150 miles away. We started talking more and more, and I heard from another friend that this girl bore some affection for me. It’s been 17 months now since we officially began our relationship, and both of us have every intention of staying together, up to and including marriage.