First Love

Looking back at her teacher's first love and her own, a young woman realizes first love isn't always the last love — and that's perfectly fine.

Have you ever wondered how your first love is doing now? I used to think about that question a lot, until I heard my high school literature teacher tell her own story, during what was supposed to be an ordinary end-of-year review session.

She told us her first love was a boy in the same grade — tall, good grades, good at sports, the kind of person she said "seemed to have walked straight out of a teen novel." They dated all through high school, studied for college entrance exams together, even promised to attend university in the same city. But once they got there, they ended up in different programs, made new friends, developed new interests. Little by little they found less and less to talk about, the calls grew rarer, and eventually they drifted apart quietly, with no anger, just two people realizing they were headed in different directions. Years later, she met the man who's now her husband — less romantic than her first love, maybe, but steady, understanding, and willing to walk the long road with her.

Her story reminded me of my own first love — someone I met freshman year of college, someone I was once completely certain would be "the one." We broke up after three years, for reasons ordinary enough: careers pulling us apart, distance after graduation, both of us changing more than either of us expected. For a long time afterward, I avoided looking at anything connected to that person, afraid I'd feel the same pain I felt the day we split.

Then one idle evening, scrolling through social media, her profile showed up in my suggested friends. I hesitated a long time before clicking. Her profile photo was a small family — her, a husband I didn't know, and a little girl, maybe two years old, grinning in her mother's arms. I sat with that photo for a while, half-expecting the old sting to come rushing back, the way I'd imagined it would for years. It didn't come. Instead, I felt something else entirely — relief, a touch of wistfulness, and genuine happiness seeing that she was doing well.

I realized that first love might be like the opening chapter of a book — necessary for the story to begin, full of feeling and the first real lessons about love, but not necessarily the best chapter, or the last one. It teaches you how to love, how to get hurt, how to forgive, and, more importantly, how to recognize what you actually need in a partner by the time you reach the later chapters.

Lasting love, I've come to think, rarely arrives with that very first spark. It's usually something you find later, once you're mature enough to choose someone who fits rather than someone who's flawless, patient enough to work through the imperfect parts together, and calm enough to look back on your first love as a beautiful part of your past — not a standard you measure everyone else against for the rest of your life.