<p>Your first REAL love (yes, the person).
What has happened since then?</p>
<p>Again, just curious…</p>
<p>Oh, ABSOLUTELY!!! (and very fondly, I might add!)<3 <3 <3</p>
<p>In fact, I remember ALL of my REAL LOVES! Four years ago I reconnected with one of my h.s. beaus, and we have an ongoing (if fairly infrequent) email correspondence. What has been most interesting is how very different our individual retrospective views are on “what happened.” Fascinating, really. Since our relationship had involved tons of correspondence and huge amounts of poetry written by him (which I still possess), he was forced to admit that <em>my</em> version of events was more accurate! 
</p>
<p>My first love and I caught up with each other not too long ago, though we are not currently in contact. It was nice to get a glimpse into his current life and to share mine as well.</p>
<p>I think it is very cool to reconnect with meaningful people from your past, and the internet has made it much easier to do that.</p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>Yes.
And the moral of the story is that if you are supposed to be together, you will be together. Just don’t go do something stupid and marry someone else while you are working things out to be together.</p>
<p>I agree with berurah that our individual retrospectives differ – but the common thread was that the amazing emotional connection was real, the timing of the relationship was bad in terms of emotional readiness and availablity, but there are a few points in time where if neither of us had been quite as proud (or maybe self preservationism was taking over) we’d be together today rather than married to other people.</p>
<p>I have been married to my first love for (almost) 24 years now. We dated in h.s. and broke up during his first semester in college (I was still in h.s.). Three years (and several boyfriends) later, we ran into each other at church on Christmas Eve, reconnected and started dating again. Got married 18 months later. After 2 kids and 24 years, it’s still great.</p>
<p>Yes, I remember. Parents broke us up (I was senior in HS) and he moved away. He died of cancer at 34 and I attended the funeral (cried my eyes out).</p>
<p>But of course…and I’m not telling!</p>
<p>Yup, I remember my first love. I’m married to him for 23 years !! We also (like packmom) dated in high school and some of college, then we broke up for a couple of years, and met again and fell in love again.</p>
<p>I just spent a few days back “home” and saw my high school boyfriend (first love) and another guy I dated. The old bf found me on the internet and we have been chatting online daily. He is married and I enjoyed meeting his wife. It has been fun to reconnect since he still lives in our home town and I had lost touch with almost everyone. A bunch of us had dinner a few times over the last week and I felt like I was living my own personal Big Chill. Not everyone has aged well, I might add.</p>
<p>My first love in HS was unrequited: he liked me “as a friend”. I was always in the same group with him and whomever was his then-girlfriend and other friends, and I always felt a little pang to realize that it wasn’t going to happen.</p>
<p>I’ve kept up with him over the years. About 3 years ago, I had dinner with him, with my younger S, in LA when I was there dropping off S for CTY camp. We got on the subject of our high school years, and I told him that I’d always wished I could have been “the girlfriend”. He put down his fork and stared at me. “Are you kidding?? I thought you weren’t interested. Wow.” It was a total shock to him to realize that I was pining away for him during HS and he thought I wasn’t interested.</p>
<p>Boy, can teenagers be stupid sometimes.</p>
<p>Funny, MM. My D is a social chicken and comes by it via honest genetics. </p>
<p>I had a very strange occurrence the other night: a friend’s stepfather died and she asked me to handle the sale of his condo. She told me that the upstairs neighbors were interested in buying it but that’s one of those yada yada things that almost never happens but in this case it did.</p>
<p>So I’m sitting at the dining table and Mrs. Buyer asks me how I knew Ms. Seller. I explained that I met I’ve known Ms. Seller and her husband for more than a quarter of a century (was none of her biz that I once dated Ms. Seller) and Seller’s daughter, Y, was only a year older than my daughter X.</p>
<p>Mrs. Buyer says “X? X TheDadsLastName? Ohmygod!” I looked at her for about a full ten seconds and then looked at the last name again and it was my turn for Ohmygod. Mr. and Mrs. Buyer are the parents of D’s biggest crush from junior & senior years of high school. D had a nickname that she always referred to the Buyerson by so I didn’t connect the last name right away. It became evident that this was one of those soap operas where all four parents knew what was going on but kept out of it at a discreet distance but that neither Buyerson nor D would actually pick up the phone and call…senior year they didn’t share any classes. But each was one the other’s mind a lot, or so it appears.</p>
<p>Facebook changes a lot of things. Mrs. Buyer e-mailed me two days later to say that Buyerson had seen D on Facebook and that she was “lookin’ good.”</p>
<p>Not only remember him, but been with him since I was 18 :).</p>
<p>Yes, I remember my first love for many reasons, but especially because he broke my heart. But that was 27 years ago (and time really does heal all wounds!) :-)</p>
<p>Absolutely … and I thank her for starting me on a life journey that took me to the place I am now. Thanks to the internet I got in contact with her a couple years ago for the first time in about 20 years … it was great to hear she was doing great and about her career, marriage, and kids. It was funny though because if you knew us 30 years ago and guessed where we’d be now you’d probably flip the outcomes of our two lifes … in HS she was the adventerous one who drew me out of my shell and eventually she married the hometown guy and stuck in one place … while I was the shy introvert who eventually took a bunch of big leaps and did a bunch of wandering before settling down.</p>
<p>I’ve been married to him for 25 years! Though H is my first love, he wasn’t my first boyfriend. I just didn’t understand what love was all about until I married him.</p>
<p>You guys like to play with dangerous stuff. Like nuclear waste.</p>
<p>
Dangerous stuff is ALL around us, all the time! ;)</p>
<p>I definitely do and it is so funny that this topic has come up now because just the other weekend my D, who was in town for Easter, told me she ran into his wife at the mall. We sort of danced around a relationship in high school. We lived very close to one another, but attended different schools. I never was really clear on why a relationship never happened, but eventually we just went our separate ways. Then one day after I was married and was pregnant with my second child, I ran into him and his wife and new baby at the home of one of my closest friends from law school–turns out the wife was a high school classmate of my friend’s husband. (Actually my husband attended the same high school.) Then I joined an organization that it turned out his wife also belonged to and we got to know each other very well over the years. My D and his S are the same age and were friends through this organization as well as high school classmates. His wife is a really lovely person and it always sort of made me feel better about him and the feelings I had for him to know that he married a woman like her. We are not in touch anymore, and I have been happily married for over 25 years, but I have never been able to forget the intensity of the feelings of that “first love.”</p>
<p>Yes, remember him totally. I was a HS sophomore and he was a HS senior when we got together. Stayed together until my senior year when I dumped him and <em>I think</em> broke his heart.
Later married someone else who is my H and soulmate, but looking back at MrFirstLove, I have wondered what happened to him. I heard he got married and I really hope he is happy. He is a musician and sometimes teaches adjunct where he lives, last I heard anyway. </p>
<p>BTW, not to say I am not happy with my husband or anything, but my guess is that I could have stayed with MrFirstLove and been very happy with him instead, if that makes any sense.</p>
<p>How do you know if you are?</p>
<p>
Very true. Allow me an anecdote:</p>
<p>I broke up with a guy when I went to law school. Dating on and off for six months; the off part was when he dumped me because I’m traditional and he’s not (that’s my euphemism for the day). He pursued me a month later because he realized that he made a mistake; he also looked into moving 700 miles to be with me at law school. He often said that he loved me. Anyway, when I talked to him the summer after my first year, he said something about us not having been exclusive. I was shocked - what, “love” and “I’ll move to your state to be with you” and we weren’t exclusive??? That, I was wise enough to not say. </p>
<p>My response: “Really?”
him: “Well, yeah, we never talked about it.”
Me: “So if I dated other guys, you would have been fine with that?”
him: Pauses. “Yeah, I guess we were exclusive.” </p>
<p>Retrospective views were then in alignment. :)</p>
<p>I thought I was in love during freshman year of college; that was until I realized that he lied to me, controlled me, and cheated on me with his former fiancee - i.e. until I figured out who he really was. That I will not forget, but for all the wrong reasons! </p>
<p>So the “first love” hasn’t happened yet. Eh. Hope you happily-married-types occaisonally recognize how lucky you are.</p>