My first couple of loves were complicated and problematic.
My first romantic experience was with an adult woman I met on the internet when I was still a teenager. I would prefer not to get into the details of this, but this was a write off. It was an inappropriate relationship that I believed was love at the time but was ultimately something else. I don't know what to call it. The romance of abuse is difficult to parse. But the nature of that relationship primed me for my next bad relationship, which I am more comfortable calling my "first love" despite it being pretty brutal on me.
It was with a girl my age with severe mental health problems I thought I could fix by being a good boyfriend. I had a lot of internalized ideas of what that meant and what I should endure for another person. That meant staying strong in the face of her violence and letting her mistreat me as a show of my love for her. So she would scream at me, she would beat me, she would threaten me with what she would do if I ever tried to leave, our sexual interactions were very dissociative and stressful. This was difficult for me to endure, but it was easy for me to accept. Being a good boyfriend and a strong man meant taking everything on the chin, which I did because I loved her.
I don't want to paint too negative of a picture of her. She had problems and needed professional help. The things she did to be were terrible but I forgive her for them. We were young and naive and she was undiagnosed. Coming out of a dramatic previous relationship with a power imbalance, this was sort of what I thought relationships were like. Volatile, full of drama, and something you suffered. It was really hard for me to unlearn that. I had to get ground to dust to free myself from that trap. My love life didn't immediately improve after that but it did get better. I opened up my sexuality, I connected with different kinds of people, and stopped using a relationship as a measure of my self worth. All is well now.
But I think back to my first real significant other and I hope she's all right. We don't speak anymore. I never regretted ending things and am not nostalgic of our time together, but being with her taught me that if I felt strongly enough I would do anything for someone. That was the first time I understood my capacity for love and why as I got older I was much more selective of where I invested it.
