First Love

Does love ever exist with the intensity and fervor as a first love or are we doomed to wallow in the wake – like sitting in the shallow end of the wave pool – lusting to feel something more than a subtle, lukewarm disturbance in overcrowded and stagnant water.

My first love once told me that she will never be able to give herself to me like she had to the first man (or, we should say, boy) she fell in love with. At the time I interpreted that as callused, insensitive and otherwise harsh. With iron in my mouth, I remember retorting that she can give herself to me. I remember convincing myself that I would never hurt her; agonizing on the idea that she might still have a piece of her left inside the lovers of her past. The gritty, steady beat of the mortar and pestle now grinding away at my heart never went away. Instead of falling apart, though, I felt my heart grow a callus of disappointment – an armor of protection. However, with that armor did I grow that much more incapable of love?

Not to say that I was in any sense of the word incapable – certainly I was not. I loved her with every part of my body. I loved her so I had no more time for friends. My ambitions became only dreams that I dozed into like a heroin dream while I wrapped myself possessively around her warmth and love. For seven years from the time that I was eighteen, I was lost in this love; unaware of the anguish and heartbreak that friends around me endured; unable to empathize when I saw a cold shell calcify over their hearts before my very eyes. She was my opium, my protective mother, shielding me from the harsh reality of the world, shrouding my vision so I could bask in the brightness of first love.

Every disappointment, every hardship, every heartbreak, I confided in her. We swirled under heavy blankets, our breath and our sweat creating an embryonic vacuum within the sheets as we lost ourselves in a passion so great that it burst out of ourselves and could only be articulated with the language of the body. The giving and receiving that communicates, “I love you.” 

As time dredged on, though, this infantile state of being became tedious. Like a toddler longing to walk on their own. I became stir crazy, longing for experience but terrified of leaving the love that I know best. I became obsessed with learning to fly but too scared to jump out of the nest. I didn’t want to endure the growing pains. I was scared that the shell on my heart would grow too fast and grow too heavy and I would hit the ground with the splat that allows evolution to select for only the most enviable flyers. I knew that I was not enviable. I knew that I would have to train twice as hard to learn to spread my wings. I am training still, and I am now almost a decade behind my peers.

Despite my hopeful projections of a shielded heart, mine remains unguarded. A grazing insult inflicts a mortal wound. I became accustomed to the gentleness and the care that she graced me with, the protection draped over me by her love. My every dissatisfaction – I see now – was a minor incursion compared to the battlefield of real-world dating. Now instead of a gentle ‘no’ or a fast and fiery assault of blunted words I am cut by the razor-like precision of ghosting and rejection. 

And as a result of my previous codependence, I am left with a social group much diminished from when I was eighteen. My community of amateur psychiatrists is lacking, to say the least. So instead I fill my time with workshops and classes, manic pursuits for community and purpose. All the parties I never attended in college, all the clubs I never joined –  I spread myself thin, like a mothers’ navel, stretching myself beyond the rational limits of my body; growing myself and expanding through pain and discomfort for the sake of the life inside of me – the emotional fetus of my future self (and let’s be clear for the sake of this analogy: the emotional work that I am enduring holds not a candle to the real-life miracle created and endured both physically and emotionally by vulva owners).

Despite the work that I put in to grow myself individually, I am scourged by uncommunicative romantic interests, made to feel like just another desperate masculine figure trying to be noticed by my feminine counterparts. Recoiling from rejection and reanalyzing my sense of self-worth, where exactly “my league” is.  Then again, I am also found on the other side of the battlefield, totally unsure how to play my cards. A budding romance grows into prompt stagnation – and for apparently no reason at all (is it simply because I am not fully healed?). All feelings I was building for a person vanish into obscurity and I am left with the decision to either ghost them or explain my situation and watch their pain. And the pain of my first love is still all-too-familiar. Can I watch someone go through even the blunted version of that?

I seek solace in my friend – one who I had lost during the final years of my relationship with her. He consoles me, “The first one always fucks you up the most.”

This is painful to hear, although, through media and life, I already know it. “I think you get your guards up,” he tells me, “but over time, you heal, and after enough break ups you’re just like, ‘oh right, this again.’”

This is exactly what concerns me, though. This callused outlook, this “numbers game.” By the time that you find your next somebody you have built up this shell of indifference. Your value for people changes and the amount of yourself that you put into each relationship – be it a conversation at the bar or a fifth date – diminishes drastically. I reflect on how much of myself I put into my first love and – along with tears – it brings happiness. It was so fulfilling to be able to connect our drives, sync data and become a singularity together; but is this a toxic model for relationships, too? Is it as toxic as a total air of indifference towards our fellow human beings?

“After spending some time with someone,” my friend tells me, “you naturally share more of yourself and start to open up.”

So, then, maybe it is like a shell, like a limestone cavern. The calcium carbonate breaks down not mechanically but through chemistry. As you find someone who you can be vulnerable around, your guards get weathered. The only difference is how long it must take for us to trust. I wonder if this armor, and knowing how to remove it, is what constitutes emotional maturity.