It might be a little early to start thinking about Valentine’s Day already, but this year, I’ve got a little extra to say — so why not start it out there?
My wife is not my first serious, long-term, live-in relationship. She’s the second serious love, the third long-term, and the fifth live-in. (What can I say? That lesbian Uhaul stereotype didn’t come out of thin air.) And, back when we first met, everyone — including me — was focusing on the fact that this wasn’t the first for me. It took a long time for me to realize that the first doesn’t always mean the best… and here’s why.
[1] I was young and dumb.
Our first love tends to be someone frivolous in the grand scheme of things. When we’re young, we can misattribute smaller feelings and inflate them so that they fill up our entire world. My world was so consumed by my first love and the fact that I had come out for her that I never thought I’d be able to find someone who made me feel the same way. I stayed in it for a lot longer than I should have, just because I thought it was my one chance at love.
Here’s the thing, though. Just because you won’t love anyone else the same way you love your First Love does’t mean that you’ll never love anyone else. It doesn’t even mean that the first love was real love. In my case, my first love was a catalyst for the rest of my life — she taught me what I wanted and what I didn’t want. But if I had married her, I would’ve resented the things I didn’t want by now.
[2] I didn’t know what I wanted.
“I don’t know what I want, but I know I need you.” I said this to my first love probably more times than I can even count during the six years I was hung up on her. It felt true at the time, too. I’d changed my major in college three times before I dropped out. I held a few jobs with trickling paychecks that somehow defined who I was despite being basically picked out of a hat. And, I tried on a few different identities involving drugs, alcohol, politics, yarn, pets, clothing styles… I was all over the place.
I didn’t know how right I really was. I did need her, but not to serve as my love interest for the rest of my life. I needed her to break all the pieces of herself back out of my heart so I could love the one I was meant for. I needed her to break down the walls so I could rediscover who I really was. I needed her to mold me into something that felt wrong so I could make the trek back to feeling right. It was a long walk back, but I wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been broken in the beginning.
[3] People change.
Of course people change, especially if you’re 15 when you first meet them. But when you’re deep in the middle of it, it’s hard to tell how much change has really happened. When we first met, my first love was the epitome of gorgeous and wild — everything an in-the-closet lesbian would look for in a mentor. But she wasn’t a mentor, she was my peer; it just took too long for me to get her off the pedestal and look at her clearly.
The truth is, I changed too. Some of my changes were good, some were bad, but all were necessary. Nature itself is in a constant state of transition, and humans should be, too. But not all people grow together or even in the same direction. Sometimes I still feel like I changed too much to be like my first love, and I regret it every time I feel it coming out. But the truth is, for about seven years, I was hung up on this person who didn’t really exist — so I created her in myself. My priorities changed, too, but change is hard and things don’t snap back into place just how they did before. It’s a part of growing up.
[4] We weren’t good for each other.
It would be easy to cop-out and say she was all wrong for me; I heard that enough from my family over the time we were together, and I could probably recite everything they didn’t like about her by the time it was all done. The issue is that I had changed to be more like her — so every attack on her character felt like an attack on me, too. We had merged, but not in the ways that anyone sets out to.
The truth is that I said and did some horrible things to her, too. I was not innocent in our seven-year story. I may have been the one who hurt most at the end, but I brought my fair share of pain, too. I was too hung up on the roles we filled in each other’s lives that I didn’t take the time to realize what roles we needed to fill in our own lives. I longed for someone different, and so did she, but we were both too stubborn to let go of our own toxicity for long enough.
[5] I never would have met my wife.
It’s actually kind of funny; the woman I did end up marrying lived less than a block away from somewhere I spent a lot of time when I was with my ex… But we never saw each other. Or maybe we did, but we were both in our own separate (toxic) relationships at the time. Either way, we spent all this time near each other and never even looked because I’m strictly monogamous. (It’s worth noting that a few minor diversions from strict monogamy ended in absolute disaster, and while I don’t automatically equate polyamorous relationships with disaster, I know they don’t work for me.)
If I hadn’t been so messed up and determined to get someone so different than my usual “type” I never would have given my wife the time of day. Even as it stands, I had one foot out for a long time because I was waiting for the shoe to drop. But if I hadn’t been through all the mess with my first love, I never would have learned to appreciate my second love.
I’d like to take this time to formally say: Thank you, First Love. You taught me so much about myself that I never would have had the courage to look for. Thank you for being the wrong one, and setting me up so perfectly for the right one. And, while we’re at it, a big thank you to my wife for understanding (much quicker) that sometimes second choice is the real winner.
Can’t get enough of the ex drama? I’ve got a book of poems that I wrote while I was still in the middle of that relationship — check it out here.
Semi-Planned Chaos 