In our early romantic relationships, there is often a mismatch between the strength of our feelings and the stark reality. So why do they linger in our memories?
www.theguardian.com
Do you remember your first love? Mine had soulful eyes, a shy smile, and I thought he was beautiful. I spent months trying to put myself in Brad’s way. He was in the same tutorial class at secondary school as me, so I enjoyed at least one daily encounter, and others could be manufactured if I walked a certain way to the lunch hall or chose my PE options wisely.
Brad was shy and he never went out with girls.
The following week, Brad caught me up on the path to maths. “Will you go out with me?” he said. It seemed implausible to my 15-year-old self that the fates would work this way. Besides, being shy, I tended to underinterpret signals. “Do you mean it?” I asked. “No shit,” he said.
Brad and I broke up two weeks later, after one kiss in the squash court during PE, and absolutely zero conversational intercourse. And yet, for 36 years, I have remembered verbatim our dialogue en route to maths, the fact that I was walking ahead of him, the paving slabs of the little path, our kiss in the squash court, the discomforting clash of our teeth. I have loved other people much more fully since then. So, why do I remember Brad more vividly? What is it about our first loves that make them so enduring in our memories, and why can we never let them go?
JFL. Just fucking lol at anyone who tries to pretend that teen/first love doesn't matter, or is overrated, or whatever the cope/gaslighting of the week is. First love fucking matters. This chick, for 36 years, remembers exactly what it was like to spend time with a guy she has dated for two weeks (and has had a crush on for two years prior.) Just fucking imagine having such an effect on a woman
. Not a single one of us will ever know what that is like, holy shit
.
Also, jfl at anyone who says that girls don't approach, meanwhile this chick has laid it out how she methodically planned her days out to spend as much time near her crush as possible
. Forget the 36 years thing, just imagine being to do something like this without even talking to that chick
. Sure, in the end it was he who had to approach,
BUT STILL WTF.
Meanwhile, the entire incelosphere is filled with guys who completely missed out on anything like this and are never getting a chance for it again
.
Even if you somehow ascend, if you aren't her first, teen love, you'll always be in danger of her leaving you to be with the guy who is her first love, and they basically admit it right after that, because the exact next chick they interview in that article got herself fucked by her teen love
decades after last seeing him.
“I think we could walk down a street and ask everyone about their first love and they could tell you about it in detail,” says
biological anthropologist Helen Fisher who, at 78, has spent a lifetime studying love.
Hahahahahahahaha, good joke, I laughed
.
She met up with her first love decades after they separated and spent a night with him. “There are some things about first love that are really dramatic,” she says, and they cannot all be explained by novelty, or what author and psychotherapist
Philippa Perry refers to the “social contagion” that has us pursuing “true” love even at age 13.
TEEN. LOVE. IS. EVERYTHING.
