Way back when I was in primary school, we all had designated desks, and they were real old-school school desks with a lift-up top and an unused inkwell in the corner.
One day, a girl called Ruth left a scrunched up note in my inkwell that simply read “I love you”; though, rather than write ‘love’, she drew a heart in place of the word. Over 30 years later, I can still picture that small ball of paper and its briefest of declarations in a pale blue scrawl.
And so, Ruth became my very first girlfriend.
Now of course, she wasn’t a real girlfriend. We were 10 or 11 years old (and she was a comically 10 or 11cm taller than me, at least), we never even kissed and I’m not sure we even ever held hands. In the playground, I got one of my mates to ask her to go out with me and she got one of her mates to tell me back that she would, but we never did (I did once pluck up the courage to call her, after dialling and hanging up countless times, to ask her to the cinema – she said yes, her dad said no). I thought I was in love, but we never saw each other again after heading off to different secondary schools, and my first love proper developed a few years later.
“Some of the pull of first love is thought to relate to imprinting,” writes Dr Luisa Dillner for the Guardian, “the psychological theory that we attach ourselves strongly to the first people we have certain relationships with; our mothers being examples of childhood imprinting.”
Combine imprinting with the fact that love has been shown to activate the same parts of the brain as addictions and the fact that first love occurs during adolescence while the brain is still developing, and it’s little wonder that it holds such psychological power.
Award-winning psychologist and author, Jefferson Singer, who’s work focusses on autobiographical memory, says that most people experience a “memory bump” between their teens and mid-20s, a time when we experience so many “firsts” and “positive memories”. As for first love, “it becomes, to some degree, a template” he tells the Washington Post: “It becomes what we measure everything else against.”
And for many, subsequent relationships are destined to fall short when compared to such idealisation. Lance Workman, co-author of Evolutionary Psychology, highlights the countless women bereaved during both world wars and their feeling that they wouldn’t ever find love again, even describing it as a form of PTSD. Professor Sue Carte, a behavioural neurobiologist at the Kinsey Institute, argues that the same chemistry that allows first love is “probably the chemistry we need to overcome trauma”.
However, Dr Nancy Kalish, a psychology professor at California State University who spent 20 years researching couples who rekindled their romance after many years apart, argues that there’s “nothing magical about first love” other than it is simply “the first”. The key to understanding it, she says, is realising how it shaped us, when everything felt new, and together “you decide what love is”. The couples she studied often fell into a certain profile, most notably being younger than 24 when they first dated and being forced to break up for circumstances beyond their control.
For the first loves that married first time around, a YouGov study found 64% of couples to report that they are ‘definitely in love’ compared to 57% of the rest of the married population, a third of whom had considered leaving their partner compared to just 19% of those first loves. Those who marry their childhood sweethearts are also more likely to believe they’ll go distance. However, other studies have shown those who settled down with their first loves to have concerns that it could have stunted their personal growth and harbour regrets about not having had more sexual and general life experiences. One worrying study found 60% of respondents, despite being happily married, to have cheated on their spouse with their first love after often having reconnected online.
Those who marry their childhood sweethearts are also more likely to believe they’ll go distance.
Dr Kalish says that such rendezvous are not necessarily cliched midlife crises – they’re happening with young parents in their 30s, “determined to have the control they lacked the first time around, when situations or their parents stood in the way”. Such reunions, she adds, are simply “a continuation of a love that was interrupted”.
In the age of social media, reconnecting with old flames has never been easier and for those first lovers that do reunite – when single! – there are some statistics that are promising. A study by California State University founder former sweethearts who met later in life to have a greater than 70% chance of sticking together for good.
“Something from the past may feel more secure than the unknown,” psychologist Anne Hollonds, former chief executive of Relationships Australia NSW, tells the Sydney Morning Herald. “It is not uncommon for us to think longingly back to missed opportunities… A lot of people have regrets about the whole sliding doors.”
