Breeding and Writing: The problem of first loves

–by Tracy Lucas

I’m a little jealous of people who marry their first loves.

The first time you love, you’re invincible. The outside world falls away. Your pairing and your faith are all that matter.

My own first true love, like almost everyone else’s, disintegrated into oblivion via fireball. It went horribly, despicably sour, and stayed that way. (It was quite the Lifetime movie type of deal. No, no details here. Sorry.)

But you lose something serious when that happens.

You lose the lack of sight.

Never again are you able, or at the very least, willing, to believe it couldn’t go sour.

You never again make that other person all you need. You reserve something aside.

It’s never complete again.

I adore my husband. I plan to be with him and no one else until I die, and I choose him all over again every morning.

But if he left me?  If something happened and I left him?

We’d both be fine. We’d hurt, we’d grieve, and we’d get over it. That’s what you do. We’ve both done it before. We know, deep in the back of each of our minds, that we’re each theoretically replaceable.

And that’s a sad way to live.

I wonder what it’s like for the happy high-school-sweetheart people who’ve never known the fallout.

Do they realize? Do they live entire lives wrapped in invincibility?

And I wonder, too, what they think of the rest of us, living practically and loving the humans instead of ideals.

I really don’t know whom to pity more.