Inspired by another thread regarding where do you draw the line regarding age and dating.
Maybe like losing your physical virginity , losing your romantic virginity is when you have your first real relationship ,thats not a crush or puppy love and then crash and burn ,and you realize that snow white only lived happly ever after cause she got it in writing.
Obviously some couples have done the highschool sweetheart thing and gone on to long lasting marriages ,but for the rest of us , has it ever been the same , since the first real one.
When I fell in love with my husband, I realized that I’d never actually been in love before, no matter what I thought at the time. This was different. And it’s never changed. I wasn’t much of a romantic before but now I’m a believer. Very weird for someone who was always as cynical and pessimistic as me.
Ow. Still hurts to remember. I traveled cross-country to see her again, deliriously happy. When I got there, she went to some length to say and demonstrate that she was available to go downstairs and make out in the basement but had nothing to say to me, that I was very interchangeable with any of a large number of male people available to her, that it didn’t mean anything special to her. It didn’t take too many years before I could see in retrospect that she just needed to be able to remain free and unattached and that it felt too much like I was coming in to lay permanent claim to her, which she wasn’t ready for with anyone.
You can only be that open to someone when you still think it’s impossible, inconceivable, that someone would turn away from this, would not want it to continue.
When you’re that open, it can hurt so bad, you have no defenses standing ready, and of course you’re not expecting that anything like that could happen, and the shock of it hurts. What’s real gets all twisted.
The withdrawal from being in love hurts so horribly anyhow, even when you’ve been there before, even when you know this too shall pass, that no you aren’t going to feel his horrid empty feeling forever and ever.
Damn, now I want to fall in love again. I really must be a masochist.
I was in love, and it was a crazy love. I was head over heels with him and never saw any flaws. We never fought for the whole time we were together, which was only 18 months, but still.
I never ever want to be like that again. It was nice to be hit by the thunderbolt for a while, but in the end it was horrible, especially when we broke up.
Why did we break up? Because he was a complete mama’s boy, who did everything his mama told me.
It was when I realized I was in love with this older, married friend of mine from college. I just adored him, respected him and found every reason in the world to be around him. I was very immature and silly and all that, but even now, 22 years later, I realize that I meant my confession of love with all my heart, even though it was alcohol-facilitated. And, although there was just one physical encounter between us and then our friendship ended, I have no regrets. I saw him at an alumni thing this summer and, although I was with the totally cute Mr. Caricci and the adorable and brilliant First-grade Caricci, my heart did a little dance and I literally caught my breath when I laid eyes on him.
In what I’ve recently decided is just the latest proof that nothing in my life is ever going to remotely resemble the concept of normality, I am now in the most romantic relationship in my life. After an adolescence which swung between indifference & rabid desire with regard to women I had a few relationships which seemed doomed from the start. Then a casual friendship turned into a marriage which lasted 20 years, and it wasn’t until my wife was dying that I realized how much I had loved her. After deciding that I was now going to spend the rest of my life alone (because who’d be interested in an overweight, middle-aged man whose social skills were lost in the mists of memory?) I met someone who not only awakened feelings I thought were buried beyond hope of disinterment, but actually had those same feelings towards me. I feel like a teenager in the throes of his first crush, and we’re both counting the days until we can be together for more than one weekend a month.
About two years into my first marriage. I’d been somewhat unhappy for quite a while, but something just “clicked” all of a sudden- and I realized that I really did love her, and that spending the rest of my life with her was actually a good thing.
Then, less than three months later, she left me for my best friend.
