COMMENT Beware men who never get over their first love

Why they’re more likely to carry torch

Some years ago, I set out to commission six authors to write a short account of their first experience of falling in love and the effect it had had on their lives.

I learned of the schoolgirl with holes in her stockings, beloved by the writer who was then her classmate; she’d let him push his fingers through the rip and he swore it was more erotic than when they finally disrobed.

Then there was the playwright who had been besotted by a teenage waitress. It became clear as we talked that none of these men had totally left these passions behind them. “If she walked through the door now,” said the writer, only half-joking, “I’d leave my wife immediately.”

Women I spoke to, by contrast, had far less enthusiasm. “To be honest,” said a historian, “my first crush kissed like a car wash.”

It seemed to me men kept their early obsessions alive because their first experience of being granted intimacy was so unexpected and overwhelming that they could never fully recover from the joy of acquiescence.

This was borne out by research in 2012 from the University of Lancaster, which found men more likely than women to carry a torch for their ex.

“It tends to be a powerful experience, and the memory sticks with us as a reminder of more carefree, uninhibited days.” says Prof. Gary Cooper, who led the research.

“These people, particularly men, who pine after their first love are probably doing so because they’re unhappy about something in their current relationship but are afraid to confront it. It is escapism and avoidance, and it’s not healthy.”

Wise women know you can fight present danger, but it’s hard to battle the past.

Those who choose to ignore this clearly haven’t read much Dante. The poet first met his beloved Beatrice when she was eight years old and he nine. He fell for her on the spot and remained infatuated for the rest of his life, eulogizing her in his work, even though she married another man in 1287 and died three years later.

Such lifelong obsession forms one thread of Jonathan Coe’s novel of male friendship, The Rotter’s Club. Ben Trotter, schoolboy writer and musician, is fixated with Cicely Boyd, the most beautiful girl at the girls’ school. In Coe’s sequel, The Closed Circle, Trotter’s failing marriage is further doomed by his preoccupation with Boyd. When she finally reappears, her beauty and health are faded, but Trotter barely registers this — his vision of her is so deeply enshrined that she will always be his ultimate object of lust.

Most of my female friends have come across at least one man with a shrine to his own personal Beatrice. It’s generally maddening, often an excuse to avoid emotional engagement and should not be indulged. Poet Caron Freeborn has the best answer to “those men that worship their first true loves/ the ones they never married, who congeal/ into a charm of sex goddess and seer.” In Georges Perec Is My Hero, she reminds men: “For we, too, are someone’s first true love ?”

Indeed, we are — but we also know that it takes a lot of work to keep the incense burning. We see too clearly that the bad-boy art student with eyes like David Bowie, is now a corpulent, greying finance manager. Besides, we have a feeling the best kiss is on the horizon, rather than far behind us.