The first time I fell in love I felt exalted and unbreakable. I brimmed with bravado because he was the sweetest first boyfriend I could find and he had a car and took me to bands. It didn’t last for long, yet I was shocked how much the end hurt. I remember gasping at the slice to my heart, the twist in my gut, the full body ache and the crying in geography class. I resolved then and there to toughen up. Older people I reasoned, have hearts that are stronger, thicker and immune to pain. I’d harden my heart just like them.
Of course that resolution didn’t last and my heart broke a couple more times before I turned thirty. Each time the pain was proportional to the level of exquisite thrill of the love. The one who glowed with shining silver light in the beginning made me feel like I was drowning in my own black blood at the end.
The one who made me giggly and giddy rendered me sobbing and heavy. By thirty, my heart had indeed hardened. It felt battle scarred, slightly calcified and less vulnerable. The grief of breaking up with the bloke who I thought was the love of my life, came with agony but also a pride in my resilience. I knew I’d recover and, with a stronger sense of self, I didn’t feel so lost.
Recently a friend of mine held her devastated au pair as the young tourist crumpled into the ball of pain that is the preserve of the first time dumped. Wiping away the girl’s wretched tears my mate pondered this question – is a broken heart worse earlier or later in life?
Rod Stuart sang ‘the first cut is the deepest’. Baby I know. But it doesn’t mean it’s the hardest to heal. Because late in life there’s more to lose.
There is nothing like the pure pain of first love. Its perfection and purity is almost beautiful. That total egocentric belief that no one else has loved like this and no one else has felt pain like this seems awfully sweet to me now. But I’m not dismissing the agony. In the 1961 film ‘Splendor in the Grass’ Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty play inter-class lovers who cannot be together. I remember watching it after a break up in my late twenties and being almost jealous of their exquisite wretchedness. The film’s title is taken from William Wordsworth’s 1807 poem which Natalie’s crumbling character is forced to read to the class.