Some of you might know this already, but I’m in my second marriage. My first marriage happened right out of school and then was over and done in what felt like a blink {but was actually two years}. Still, no matter how long or short, first love leaves a mark on you. But nothing as powerful as second love.
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The first time you fall in love, it’s easy. You grow up surrounded by stories of romance and love and you crave it. You yearned for and accepted love with wide open arms. You walk in, untainted by expectations or past experiences, carrying no baggage, expecting miracles.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s perfect, and sometimes it isn’t perfect but you’re able to overcome those hurdles together and work through the problems, and grow stronger in the process. I firmly believe this happens, because I’ve watched it happen around me.
Then there are the times where everything comes apart. It doesn’t matter how. Maybe it’s a phone call, a text, a dinner out where someone asks for some space, or you’re sitting on opposite sides of a table during binding arbitration, looking at someone you used to love as if they were a total stranger or worse, an enemy. Whatever happens, it ends, and it leaves you broken and shattered.
There’s no formula, no rule of thumb, for how long recovery takes. Maybe you bounce back fairly quickly, maybe you don’t. Maybe you think you do, but you’re still carrying an emotional burden you don’t even realize you’re carrying. Maybe you’re determined to find love again. Maybe you think that would be the worst thing possible. And maybe you’re convinced that it doesn’t even exist at all, that it was all a lie.
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A bit about my first love…
I met my first love when we were both cadets. We’d known each other for a while and had become friends, but when we were working on the same staff at the beginning of our senior year, things evolved. We made plans to be stationed at the same post. He proposed the April before graduation. We were married that next December.
It didn’t take us very long to realize that things were very wrong between us. And then they just kept going even more wrong. Everything finally culminated when I was overseas on my first deployment, and when I came back, my folks met me at the airport, helped me move my stuff out of the house, and helped me file for my divorce.
The details of what went wrong between us are personal, so I won’t outline anything in depth. Let me just say that my ex-husband’s biggest strength and biggest weakness were the same in this case: he was a nice guy. And he wasn’t willing or wasn’t able to stand up to a relative who was hell-bent on getting into our lives, and became downright abusive. The choice became to either take it without backup or leave.
You guys know me enough by now to know I don’t take crap from anyone. I left.
That was nine years ago.
It took me one day to pack and leave, but years to recover.
I don’t care how much therapy you go to, how many self-help books you read, or how confident you are. Making the decision to leave someone you have loved is hard. Even if you have a ton of reasons to leave, even if you’re fully justified in leaving, it is hard.
The hardest part for me was second-guessing everything I thought I knew about love, about people, and about myself. I don’t know how long I wallowed in the guilt over making what turned out to be such a bad decision, about inflicting drama on my family, about walking away from the dreams and the life we’d planned together. Even though my family was there for me, even though I had friends who cared, I felt suddenly and completely alone.
I didn’t handle it well. I went looking for love, as if I needed to prove to myself that I was lovable. Those of you who have been on the dating circuit know how well that works out. I dated jerk after jerk, guys I knew were jerks when I dated them but the hell with it, I did it anyway. I think I was convinced that they would all turn out to be jerks anyway, so at least knowing it going in, it wouldn’t be so bad when they inevitably revealed their jerkiness somehow.
I finally got sick of the whole thing. I didn’t want to deal with one more jerk, so I swore off the whole thing and totally and completely threw myself into my work. I’m a bit of a workaholic to begin with {it’s easy when you enjoy what you do}, so it became very easy to lose myself in simultaneously holding down my position and another key position within my unit that my commander needed help with, to become an absolute machine when I deployed again, and to throw myself into grad school afterward with a single minded determination.
I dated a couple times during that period, but broke it off early on just because I knew what I was getting into. I knew that I was going to be dealing with just another jerk. Looking back now, I don’t know that they were jerks at all. They could be completely nice guys for all I know, but I I had them categorized right out of the gate.
Somewhere in there, though, I met this guy:
(c) Kelly Schwark, 2012
I had no intention of dating anyone when I met him, and yet I found myself laughing with him when we were out with friends, enjoying his jokes, no matter how corny they were, and saying yes when he offered to cook dinner so we could exchange recipes. Somehow, I said yes when he wanted to go see movies or go ride his motorcycle around, and when I was working on redoing my kitchen, he was there with tools and work gloves, ready to help.
I went to grad school, saying I wasn’t up for a relationship. But we kept in touch. He was unfailingly supportive and kind and everything that the jerks I’d been dating weren’t. I wondered how any guy could possibly be that nice. Obviously, he was way too nice for me to date.
He’s too…nice…to date? Wait. What?
This epiphany hit me one day when I was driving to the grocery store. I clearly remember exactly where I was, exactly what the trees around me looked like, that there was just a little sun coming through the clouds, when I blinked at that thought and then thought, What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I date jerks when I could be dating a nice guy? One who actually wanted to date me and do kind things for me? How was this bad?
This is the divorce mindset, friends.
Since our first love didn’t end in a fairy tale, we’re convinced love is a fairy tale.
I called that happy handsome guy when I got home just to catch up. We talked for I don’t know how long. This went on for a couple months, and he invited me to come see him over spring break. I did.
Months later, we moved to New York together.
Then a year later, this happened.
First dance kiss (c) Disney Fine Art Photography, 2012
There’s a lot more to the dating and courtship and wedding story than that, but if you’ve been around my blog for a while, you’ve heard most of that. And if you want wedding stuff, click here. But that wasn’t the important part I learned when I met my now husband. The important part was this:
If it didn’t work, your first love isn’t important. Your SECOND love is.
Your first love is easy, because you’re ready for it and you welcome it. Your second love is the person that teaches you how to love all over again when you thought love was just a fairy tale. Your second love is the person who knows you’re not just asking for love, you’re asking for real love…until something happens, until your heart breaks, until what you’ve learned about love comes around because you expect it at every fight, at every disagreement, even though your head knows better.
Your second love is the person who teaches you how to love sanely, because the first love is always more than a little bit insane – and this time you kind of know what you’re getting into. Your second love is the person that you should talk about things like marriage and kids and owning cats with, because you and your first love weren’t responsible enough for cats, let alone kids.
There might be some of you out there making first love work. I believe it can happen, and when it does, it’s beautiful. My parents are first loves. They met in junior high, dated in high school, and have been married for 41 years now. They’re celebrating their anniversary today.
Happy Anniversary (c) Karla Freberg {my little sister}
For the rest of us who have lost first love, it’s so, so important not to lose faith. Not to lose the belief that that love wasn’t real, that love itself isn’t real, because then we settle. Or we allow ourselves to wander down a path where we can’t even love ourselves, because we don’t believe we can be loved. We have to remember that that first love, as painful as it might have been, was real, and that love is real, so that we can love ourselves and, just maybe, love again.
For those of you who have discovered second love, you know it’s magical. It won’t be the first time, but it will be better. The first time, you believed in the fairy tale already. The second time, someone very special had to reach through the darkness and the doubt and make you believe.
