First Love, First Heartbreak

She was the kind of girl every parent could hate...

For their son to date.

I'd better watch it or this could become a bad poem.

On the subject of first loves, first heartbreaks, etc. A fellow blogger wrote about his, and that got me thinking about my own.


16 years old, not understood by my family (like every other 16 y.o.). You get the full attention of a cute girl and that (as they say) is that. We were the personification of young love. Total strangers would walk by as we sat on a park bench, point, and say: "They in Love!" (This is true).


Gave one another our virginity, it was almost like a (Bob Seger) song.


Or better yet, like a bi-polar drug info-mercial.

The highs were great, 'never felt anything like it. The lows just as awful.

I'll explain my opening statement. Why my parents wished she would go away.

1. From the wrong side of the tracks.
2. Italian (worse Sicilian).
3. She manipulated their son like a puppet on a string (and they couldn't)
4. Well, let's leave it at that. You get the idea.


The unspoken fear (I think. 'Don't know- it was unspoken) was that we would make little Cubils before we even finished high school. On THAT they (and I) should have been afraid. Very afraid.


But with vast reserves of that ignorant bliss I have mentioned in previous posts, we went at it like monkeys in heat: in the evenings in the hallway of her apartment building (about 30 times), while her mother was in the next room on the phone (just once), almost every morning before school started. And all without any kind of birth control (other than withdrawal. Did I mention she was Catholic?).

Our relationship ran through senior year of high school, and one year after that. It was a long drawn-out breakup.


File this one under events that should have defined my life, but didn't.


With the wisdom of hindsight, I finally learned a few things:

1. My first girlfriend was basically my mother
2. She didn't get pregnant because she was on drugs that messed with her cycle.
3. Relationships are very complicated.
4. On birth control from the student nurses I befriended in my apartment: "Who do you think you are Jesus Christ?"

Learning along the way, I did not date the same type girl over again. On the eve of partner and my 30th wedding anniversary, I am not any expert on the subject. Just a guy who has been shown a great deal of grace.