First Love

Your first love always makes a chink in your heart that never quite heals over. At the time it’s an all-consuming affair and when it’s over it feels like the end of the world. But then you get on with your life, meet significant others, change direction, forget, and forge ahead. And yet…

It took a long long time for me to expunge the memory of my first love from the forefront of my mind. He was fun, good humoured, and generous to a fault. I met him on the phone – I rang, he answered, a mutual friend had put us in touch: "If ever need company while you’re in London (it can be a very lonely place) call him up, you’ll like him." Well I did, and I did, and we were together for probably less than a year.

Fast-forward forty years and he landed on my doorstep, grinning, full of good cheer and bonhomie. Sure what’s four decades between friends?! No, we can’t put the clock back, can’t exchange the children, nor the ones to whom we eventually pledged our troths, for better (him) or worse (me). The years have neither been kind nor cruel considering the life experiences that made us into who we became since he was 23 and I was 19. And there’s no one quite like an old love who sees you as you were then, who doesn’t notice the ravages of time, the inevitable changes wrought by fair means and foul, who still thinks you have what it takes. And yet…

I’ve always been a sucker for a love story but somehow they’re never quite the happy ever after I’ve dreamed of; perhaps that’s how it is in real life. I remember reading Love Story by Erich Segal, a tear-jerker of the highest quality in which Oliver, who narrates the whole experience, tells how met, loved and lost the most important person in his life, Jennifer. I loved it, and yet it made me cry.

I’m older and wiser and rather immune to all that balderdash nowadays. True love’s all very well, in its place, but I’d rather have life on an even keel and leave the highs and lows where they belong: between the pages of a book. And yet…