First loves

and why I love tragic romances

They say you never forget your first love.

I can’t say anything for sure but, so far in my experience—and the extensive research I conducted by interrogating approximately five emotionally unstable friends—you really don’t.

You move on, technically. You continue living. You meet new people, grow older, become wiser, learn healthier patterns of attachment. You even fall in love again. But first loves are always different—innocent—because they happen before your heart learns caution. Before you realise people can leave. Before you understand timing, distance, incompatibility, emotional unavailability, or the thousand mundane ways love can fail. Your first love happens when your heart still believes feeling something deeply is enough to make it last.

That’s why first loves are rarely even about the actual person. If someone asked you rationally why you loved them in the first place, you probably couldn’t even explain it. Why it feels so hard to let go? It’s easier to let go of a person but not as easy to let go of that feeling—almost like a betrayal.

You’d repeat the details that sound insignificant to everyone else but were enough reason to make you fall. The way they laughed. The way they said your name and how such a small action made your whole heart flutter. The way they handed you a pen in class and your brain decided this was cinematic enough to write poetry about for the next three years.

I think that’s why people romanticise them so much. Memory is merciful. Nostalgia is really a liar and all that remains is a softened version of them. You place them on a pedestal so high they stop feeling human altogether. You speak so fondly of them for all that’s remaining is a faint memory. You mourn them like something sacred that died young.

And you don’t curse the dead.

Now, a few fortunate people probably end up with their first love. I personally do not know anyone like that, so we will not be exploring that narrative. Instead, we’ll discuss my favourite kind of love: unrequited love. The most humiliating and poetic kind.

I don’t know if the idea that “you never forget your first love” is actually beautiful when you think about it deeply. Honestly, it’s terrifying. The idea that someone will always be your first. That there was a version of your heart so untouched, so inexperienced, that it loved someone when it didn’t even know how to and yet it chose to.

There’s something equally haunting about knowing you will never be someone’s first love either. No matter how deeply someone loves you later, they will arrive carrying memories of another person. Another beginning. Another first heartbreak.

Your first love might not be your soulmate but they always have a part of your soul that you willingly handed to them. You trusted them enough with it.

And maybe that’s because what you become attached to isn’t entirely the person—it’s the feeling.

Your heart experiences love for the first time and suddenly the world rearranges itself around that feeling. Music sounds different. Skies turn pink. You begin measuring your days around small interactions and stolen glances. Your heart skips a beat everytime someone even mentions their name. It’s euphoric. Terrifying. Addictive. As your heart experiences it’s first high it soon becomes addicted.

People often confuse the drug for the person. But the addiction was never really them. It was the feeling of becoming alive for the first time through someone else’s existence.

And addicts rarely let go willingly.

So you hold on to them, even if just a part of them. You cling to fragments if that’s all you have. A picture you never deleted. A song you cannot listen to normally anymore because it still tastes like them. You tuck these things away carefully, almost ceremonially, and pretend you’ve moved on completely—but I don’t know if you ever really do. You never forget your first high, right?

And now that your heart knows what it feels like, it keeps chasing that feeling but nothing ever feels the same. It can be better, healthier, more real even but it will always be different.

So you grieve their loss like losing a loved one. Bury them deep within, arrange for a funeral. And if you’re verbose like me, you’ll write them a eulogy disguised as a poem or twenty poems, perhaps. Maybe more, I’ve lost count, really. You’ll immortalise them in metaphors they will never even read. You’ll turn them into literature because you cannot bear the idea that something which altered you so deeply could disappear without leaving behind evidence that it existed.

You miss them but really you miss the version of yourself that you were then. When you loved without caution. The person you were before heartbreak taught you better. Before you learnt how scary vulnerability can feel. Before love became something you analysed instead of simply falling into.

That’s the cruel thing about first loves. Sometimes you are not grieving the person anymore. You are grieving your own innocence.

You miss the love you had—even if unrequited.

Fulfilled love stories are never as fun anyway. It’s always the tragic romances that become legends.