Brandi, 23, believes that she had two first loves. Her first love, Joey, was her craft buddy in kindergarten, and they shared a quick peck on the cheek while finger painting. Unfortunately, that relationship ended when she caught him eating paste. “I was like, that’s gross!” she laughs. “That was pretty much the end of it.”
But her relationship with Miguel was much more mature. The two met her freshman year in college and quickly fell in love. “He was an artist, and he was very moody. But he was so creative and we had a great physical connection,” she says. They dated for two years before breaking up.
Brandi thought that she had left Miguel firmly in her past until she started fighting with her current boyfriend, and realized that she was having the same arguments-- often verbatim-- that she used to have with Miguel. The weird part: her new boyfriend was nothing like Miguel. It turns out that Brandi was simply re-enacting the role she used to play in her first serious relationship. Once she realized what was going on, she made a concerted effort to focus on the differences between her new love and her old one, and she also filled her new boyfriend in on where she was coming from. Their fights seemed to evaporate into thin air.
There is a temptation to dismiss our first relationships because they may seem inconsequential due to our lack of experience. But the truth of the matter is that these romances act as the foundation for our future relationships, and can have a real impact-- positive or negative-- on our preset day situations.
In order to “stack the deck” in your favor and ensure that your dating life is as successful as possible, it is important to take a mental inventory of your past relationships and think about how they may be affecting your outlook on men, love, and life in general. You may want to ask yourself these questions:
1. Who was your first love? What did he like, what did he dislike? If you had to describe him in three words, what would they be?
2. How did the two of you first meet? What attracted to you to this man?
3. How did the two two of you decide to pursue a more serious relationship? Did he initiate the process, or did you?
4. What were the best parts of your relationship? Next, describe the bad parts of your relationship.
5 How did the two of you break up? How did it make you feel when your relationship ended?
After you’ve answered these questions, take a look at your more recent relationship history and look for connections. For people who had particularly traumatic or abusive first relationships, it may make sense to seek the help of a mental health professional to assist you in moving forward. Your past is in the past, but history sometimes repeats itself, and often just the knowledge of that can help you make healthier romantic decisions in the future.
