Remember that scene in The Way We Were when Barbra Streisand stands almost defiantly at the top flight of stairs staring down at dreamy Robert Redford in his crisp white military suit?
Saying goodbye, he tips his hat to her and their eyes linger. Her eyes are saying, “Don’t leave” and his are pleading for her to say it out loud. These first loves tend to define who we are or who we want to become. When we make our way in the world, we look for validation and no one validates us more than a romantic partner.
In my new literary anthology Crush, many of the contributors fondly remember their own first loves with such longing. In Jacquelyn Mitchard’s moving portrait of her passionate yet short-lived relationship, she falls for the boy who becomes a soldier and dies tragically in Vietnam. Their story lives on in the letters she carefully hid in her fringed hippy purse and discovers again twenty years later in a thrift store window. Jackie confesses about the first time her blue-eyed Romeo kissed her, “It was evident I had never been born to want to do anything else and I would never for an hour, not for decades, think about anything else again without thinking about that first time.” She suspects if her children find her letters years from now, they will realize, “they comprise a holy relic of something they’ve never been able to imagine me being- a girl purely in love and in love purely, white-hot as snow.”
Lauren Oliver may best describe the euphoria of first love and its bittersweet nostalgia in her essay “Three Little Words.” When she rhapsodizes about her relationship with her first real boyfriend, she recalls, “I think of that curious admixture of intense pleasure and sharp pain, like the ache in your limbs and chest after you’ve just sprinted a very long way: a winding down, a happiness in being through, a joy in having pushed yourself to the end of something; and also some regret for all the distance you’ve covered so quickly, a distance you can never get back. Even when I was with Steve, it seems to me I was already nostalgic for our love and already mourning its end.”
First loves make lasting impressions on us that may often take a lifetime to get over. I discovered while editing Crush that they’re also a kind of gift because they make us stronger in the end.
Andrea N. Richesin is the editor of Crush: 26 Real-life Tales of First Love and three other literary anthologies. Check out the Crush book trailer and look for upcoming readings (in North Carolina, Tennessee, Oregon and Washington) on her website www.NickRichesin.com.
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