‘I have mourned her for decades’: why first loves can shape our lives for ever
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. I would note our meetings in my diary, where I gave Brad (not his real name) the codename “Gregory”, which I considered uncrackable and lush, probably because my mother admired Gregory Peck. (I later learned, when she asked me if I knew a boy called Gregory, that my mother had found my diary, but that’s another story.) Brad was shy and he never went out with girls. I tormented myself with challenging metaphysical questions, such as, “How well do I know Brad?” and, “Do I really love him or is this an infatuation?” It stumped me how Brad did not see that he and I were perfect life partners. After two years of Brad remaining steadfastly unobtainable, I decided to go off him. My love ended as abruptly as it started.
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?
“We have loads of relationships, but in some ways we learn the most from the very first one,” says Catherine Loveday, a professor at the Centre for Psychological Sciences at the University of Westminster. I’m certain I learned nothing from Brad – but, then again, maybe my subconscious knows otherwise, because these questions engrossed me while I was writing my novel, Speak to Me. It tells the story of a woman who becomes obsessed with her husband’s phone – he cannot keep his hands off it – and who in turn nurtures her own distractions. She has lost a case of letters, written by her first love, and must decide whether to go in search of him, or to put the past in its place.
“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. 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.
As part of her research, Fisher “put people in brain scanners and studied the brain circuitry of love. I’ve found the basic pathway of people who have fallen madly in love,” she says. “It’s a very interesting pathway”, and it originates in “a tiny little factory near the very base of the brain, called the VTA or ventral tegmental area.” Fisher had expected to find this pathway in the outer part of the brain, where we do our cognitive thinking, or in the middle part, where our emotions reign. “But no. This pathway lies right next to the factory that orchestrates your drive – for hunger, thirst, the drive for shelter, the drive to learn, the drive to create.” And, of course, as Fisher puts it, the evolutionarily driven need “to send your DNA into tomorrow”.
When Fisher put the participants in her research into those scanners, “we found activity in the addiction centres of the brain. You’re addicted when you fall in love with somebody,” she says. “Addictedto them.”
Each morning I walked into my tutorial class, or engineered a “chance” encounter with Brad, I was driven by the production of dopamine in my VTA. It doesn’t matter that the love lacked depth or practicality. “It had emotional power,” Loveday says, “purely because of what’s going on chemically in the brain. The reward pathway activation you get every time you see that person, have contact with that person, is a very big predictor of whether something will stick in our mind.
“When we form a memory, it’s not some magical thing. We’ve got a network of cells that fire together to give us a conscious experience of remembering … We learn through pleasure and pain. Stuff that’s good we want to do again, and stuff that’s painful we want to avoid. In very simple terms, that pleasure-pain index is a chemical barometer in the brain [that decides] whether something needs to be done again … quite literally reinforcing neuronal circuits in the brain.”
However, first loves are rarely last loves. One problematic outcome of this chemical system is that first loves often flounder on a catastrophic mismatch between strength of feelings and future viability.
Witness the accounts of Guardian readers who wrote in to share their experiences of the first loves from which they have never recovered. “She broke up with me a year after I met her. I’ve mourned her ever since. No girl could match her. I could not feel for others, even for my future wife, what I had felt for her,” writes one 78-yearold. “I had a couple of relationships after, but they weren’t as good. I spent vast periods of my life single,” shares another. “Every person since has unknowingly been compared,” admits a 30-year-old reader. “No one has ever matched up to what I had with him,” writes another, in her late 60s.
Why are some people affected so powerfully by their first love that they are unable to love as fully again? Lance Workman, co-author of Evolutionary Psychology, points out that this was the case for many bereaved women during the first and second world wars. “It’s a form of PTSD – they don’t feel they can love again.”
“It is a very important question,” says Prof Sue Carter, a biologist and behavioural neurobiologist at the Kinsey Institute. “Because the same chemistry that allows first love is probably the chemistry we need to overcome trauma.” When someone in their late 70s shares that subsequent loves never matched up, “what they are telling you is that that first relationship blocked their capacity to love later”.
Carter shares a “tidbit” about William Masters, the gynaecologist and sex therapy pioneer, who, along with Virginia Johnson, pioneered research into human sexual behaviour. “Masters and Johnson were married for 20 years before they divorced, after which Masters married his third wife, Geraldine Baker, whom he first knew in medical school, and whom he had met again by chance. It has been reported that Masters sent Baker roses and a love note when they were in college, but she never acknowledged them, and he
only discovered at the age of 79 that she had never received them. Was Masters’ young love for Baker, “a barrier to forming lasting relationships with his first two wives?” Carter asks. “In relationships, we can only speculate, but in trauma there is a great deal of research on this. Many people who have had so-called traumatic experiences seem not to have the ability to rewrite those experiences.” It is not a huge leap to imagine that a failed first love might impose a similar legacy.
Margaret Magee, who responded to the Guardian’s call-out, was not traumatised when she broke up with her first love, Graham, at 17. But subsequently, “I was traumatised by the fact that I’d let him go when I really shouldn’t have”, she says. Though married, she kept the letters he’d written to her in a carrier bag, and read them occasionally. “I found solace in looking at them. I thought, ‘This was a person that really loved me.’ I missed him every day. It sounds hideously oversentimental, but it’s true.”
After her marriage ended, Magee contacted Graham, and they got back together. At their wedding, 10 years ago, they danced to Careless Whisper – which they had first danced to at Magee’s 18th birthday. She is now 56. “I know you’ll think it was science or psychological,” she says. “I think it was fate.”
Perry comes across this scenario surprisingly often. (Indeed, Fisher says that her sister also married her first love after a long period apart.) “You see them as they were,” says Perry. And, presumably, doing so allows us to see ourselves as we were, too. “We do retain the image of someone and what they looked like when we first met them. I got off with my husband the first time when he was 27,” Perry says. “He’s a 62year-old man now but he is perpetually 27 to me … I can’t imagine getting off with anyone old if I was widowed. I’d have to go for the small pool of people I knew as a teenager. ”
Most people do not reunite with their first love, of course. So, why carry the imprint of those first experiences? Why doesn’t my memory, for instance, identify Brad as a waste item (as I hope he has me – that was a terrible kiss) and dispose of him to make room for things that it would be helpful to remember, such as deadlines, medical appointments, or what I was saying 30 seconds ago? Surely a very old love for a very young person is memory junk that needs clearing out.
“Gosh, no. No, no, no. So much the opposite,” says Loveday. “The fact that those memories stay – even in someone who’s in their 70s, 80s or 90s – tells us that this is a really important event. The discovery of relationships is absolutely paramount to the rest of our lives … It’s not a wasted memory because we continue to learn and we continue to use it as a foundation for who we are. These memories help to give us a sense of what kind of person we are, what kind of lover we are, who we are.
“The teenage years are a biologically optimum time, from a brain perspective, for retaining knowledge and developing memories,” she says. While memories fade the further back we go, “we have this weird anomaly” in our teenage years – a “big reminiscence ‘bump’”. Our strongest and sharpest memories across our lifetime form between the ages of 10 and 30, and typically peak at around 15.
No wonder so many Guardian readers were able to recall their first encounters as precisely and filmically as if they were replaying the scene. “She was in black school uniform and wearing glasses. She was holding a pen and spinning it in her fingers,” writes one. “He sat next to me on a sticky sofa in the bar and put his arm around me,” remembers another. “I met him at a pyjama party when I was 15 … a teenager with eyeliner, some kind of woman’s blouse, studded belt. He had an aura about him, like someone who’d already lived more life than anyone in that room.”
Loveday, who remains friends with her own first love, points out that when asked to recall songs that are important to them, “people will often choose one that relates to a first love. When you think about how many pieces of music we know and how many we encounter in our life … you have to ask yourself, why? Why would someone in their 70s – when they can choose from all the songs in the world – choose a song that reminds them of their first ever relationship?”
Sometimes, she says, we “bump into” our memories. A bit like going to a library in search of a book only to find that a familiar one, sticking out a little more on the shelf, catches our eye. “Nostalgia gets a really bad press,” she says. “But, for most people, nostalgia is really good for our wellbeing. There’s a lot of evidence that it makes us more adventurous, think more positively and make better decisions about the future.”
When I think of Brad, and honestly I do not do this very often, it is our silence that has stayed with me, alongside the gnashing teeth – the shame of having a “boyfriend” I could not talk to, the invalidating effect of my reserve. I called my novel Speak to Me and it features a character who is unable – or perhaps not permitted – to do just that. It’s a novel, of course, and entirely fictional. But it is about all the ways we say and don’t say the things in our hearts. So maybe Loveday is right, and I have continued to learn from and make use of my first love – just not in the way that I expected.
We found activity in the addiction centres of the brain. You’re addicted when you fall in love
Helen Fisher