my first love experience essay

First Love Stories: 8 People Share What Their First Love Felt Like

By Teen Vogue

Everyone says you'll never forget your first love , and it's absolutely true. There's nothing like the feeling of falling in love , and the first time you feel that spark, you're changed for good. It's sort of an indescribable thing — everyone has a different first love experience, but the essence of it is the same. People talk about magic, about fire, about everything falling into place. 

In honor of Valentine's Day, we asked eight people to share their first love stories. We got the heartwarming and the heartbreaking, and some funny stories along the way. 

The Fling Turned First Love

My first love felt like speaking a new language, one that only we knew. It took months for love to come — at first it was a fling, never meant to be shared outside my dirty Boston sublet where we shacked up all summer long. But when school started back up in the fall, we didn't part ways like we'd planned. Instead, we spent all our free time together, exploring the city and each other. They told me they loved me one night in my bed by tracing the letters on my palm. I guessed each letter as they wrote it, stringing them together to name the feeling we both shared. Somehow, we both knew our love wouldn't last forever, but it didn't stop us from reveling in the moment. We shared a beautiful, supportive, and thrilling love for two years before it dissolved. The end was painful, gut wrenching, and now we no longer talk — the language we wrote together is dead, but I still remember how to speak it.

The High School Sweetheart

My first love was my high school sweetheart. I was the new girl and he approached me at my locker to introduce himself. I became really close with his best friend and one day, while his friend and I were talking, I did a split. Eugene immediately excused himself from the conversation he was having with another girl and rushed over to say how that was amazing. He would walk me home (he lived a whole city away), cheer me on at my games, write me notes, talk about me wherever he was. Everyone knew Eugene loved and was with Darlene. I’ll never forget how one day I came home from my shift at the hospital and he messaged me to go downstairs and check the mailbox. Inside were 2 bags of my favorite candy. It meant the world to me. He would drive me around to the weirdest places just because I wanted to go. He paid attention to the small details about me and it’s something I’ve always loved. I'm so thankful for him being my first love because he’s shown me, for the most part, how I would like to be loved and that it’s possible. 

The Best Friend Love

We met when we were 15, and it was the most slow-burn friendship to falling in love with the whole of someone. Like finding your best friend and falling in love with them. And then it was paperclip rings, and quiet moments at the beach, and dramatic first kisses, and dancing. So much dancing. Like the electricity sh*t but not cringe. Like real and premature ventricular contractions, heart skipping beats. Like looking in someone’s eyes and knowing that they aren’t looking at you, they see you. Like they aren’t hearing, they’re listening . Where even the most ordinary moments feel extraordinary.  It’s like meeting someone’s brain and, even if they’re totally different, it just makes sense. Five years later, I still love him, and it’s magical. Just magic.

The Long Distance Lover

I met my first love at 11 years old when I was living in the Philippines. We got “together” (in the way pre-teens can get together) at 12, but then broke up when my family moved to Ireland. At 15, we wrote LETTERS to each other and got back together again and stayed together for the next five years! Not a happy ending, though. He ended up cheating on me. I also have to add that I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend because my parents were very strict, so it was a lot of sneaking around and asking my cousins for help so we could meet up.

The Check Yes Or No

My first love was a boy named John in elementary school. I thought he was the cutest boy in all of the fifth grade. I would try to play with him through recess and talk to him in class, but he just wouldn't give me the time of the day. One day, I was brave enough to write him a letter, literally a 'Dear John' letter. I asked one of his friends if they could give it to him and they did. I remember standing on the other side of the playground, waiting for him to read the letter, and I watched him take the letter and throw it in the garbage. I was devastated. My little 11-year-old heart was broken and I vowed to never speak or look at him ever again. Roughly 10 years later, a group of us contacted each other on Facebook and decided to meet up for a reunion. I saw John again for the first time after nearly a decade and we made up for lost time, catching up with each other and what we had been up to after high school. We dated briefly after that but it didn't work out. We were both in different places mentally. Although we are both parents now and just Facebook friends, I still consider him my first love and my first heartbreak.

The Brace-Locking Romance

My first love was this boy Josh who dated all my friends. It was a very PEN15 situation. Finally, it was my turn to be his girlfriend. So, one night when my father was sleeping, we snuck out to the roof of my apartment building and kissed — it was my first kiss. Of course, being that we were both 13 years old, when we kissed our braces locked and we couldn’t separate ourselves from each other. We were stuck together! By the time we separated, my dad and the super busted us on the rooftop. I was grounded for a week, but still snuck phone calls to my first love in the bathroom at night and sat with him at lunch until he dated someone else. I knew because he sent her a note in home room. Young love is hard! 

The Short King

My first love was named Joey, and he lived around the corner from me. We grew up together and we always had a mutual flirtation. When we started middle school, he asked me out on a date… Finally! I had a growth spurt really early on and by the time I was 13, I was really tall. He hadn’t had his yet, and was four inches shorter than me. But that didn’t matter to me. When we went out on our first date, the usher made me buy an adult movie ticket for myself and a child ticket for him. Now, the reason why they made me buy the ticket is because they thought that I was his mother or older sibling because I was so much taller than him. Anyway, I was totally humiliated because it ruined the vibe. But, that didn’t stop us from dating for the next two years.

By Kaitlyn McNab

By Sara Delgado

By Kristi Kellogg

The Spoiled Salad Love

I had a date with my crush in junior high school. We were going to hang out at the local arcade. Before I went, I was eating dinner with my family and I shook a container of salad dressing and the whole thing exploded all over my hair and my outfit. I tried to shower and change my clothes but I still smelled like Italian salad dressing. The whole time we were out he was asking me if I smelled what he was smelling — I said no. Needless to say, we never went out again because I smelled like a salad on our first date.

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Personal Essays | First Love

I’m not sure if I’m just making this up, but I feel I’ve heard it before: “you never recover from your first love.” Do you remember that feeling, falling in love for the first time? And how, when it ended, you were sure you’d never recover, never fall in love again? You were doomed to spend eternity alone, crying, heartbroken…and then some time passed, and you weren’t alone? You moved on? I remember.

It was late 1996 when I first saw him. I remember walking past him in the hall in middle school, and looking at him felt different from all of the other crushes I’d had in my 13-year-old life. There was something different and beautiful about him. His hair was dyed a reddish-pink and his blue eyes just destroyed me. I remember random things about when we first started dating, like how he came to my house and recorded my outgoing answering machine message with a snippet of “Spiderwebs,” by No Doubt playing in the background. I remember our first kiss. Our phone conversations and how neither of us would say goodbye, eventually leaving one of us to hang up on the other. I remember him taking a piece of the blue beanie he wore and tying it around my necklace. And I remember how devastated I was when he broke up with me the night before I left to Puerto Rico with my family for spring break.

We lost touch after that.

As high school went on, I dated others, always with him in the back of my mind. I remember feeling pangs of jealousy when I saw him in the hallways with new girlfriends or heard stories about him, missing all the fun we had together. I stuffed the feelings of love I had for him as far down as possible and just went on with my life. College began and I was in another relationship; I had moved on and life was just bumping along as it was supposed to. Facebook came out, I made an account, and when I saw he had friend requested me (one of my first there too!) I anxiously accepted. A message here and there and I was back in touch with my first love, and I was so excited to have a glimpse in to his life again. When I began my second relationship of my college years, it was oddly comforting to see he was watching. He’d send me messages asking why I was dating that new person (something I still wonder about myself…worst relationship ever), but something about getting his attention, no matter how small, meant so much. Years went by and we stayed in and out of touch until the fall of 2013.

It’s an impossible dream, to think that the one who got away will come back. So when he and I began talking daily, not just through Facebook but by text and phone, I found myself scared and confused by the overwhelming way all of my childhood feelings of love came flooding back. He asked if I would meet him for a date…obviously I said yes. I remember getting in the car and crying hysterically on my way to meet him. Something inside of me told me this would be magical yet wouldn’t last very long, and I suppose looking back, I was scared to lose him for a second time. How right my intuition was.

He called when I was around the block to let me know he was at the restaurant waiting for me. I nervously went over to him, and the first thing he said as he proceeded to shake my hand was, “Wow, you grew up well.” The night went smoothly, like no time had passed at all, and, before we parted ways, he apologized for breaking up with me as kids. From that night forward we began to talk daily for hours on end, driving to one another frequently. We talked about everything and anything. I was touched as he opened up to me about his battle with depression. I shared my experiences too, and we vowed to be there for one another should times ever get tough. As the months went on and we grew closer, we began talking about me coming to stay with him at the new apartment he was moving into, sharing ideas for meals we would make for dinner and other such things. One day in mid-March of 2014 he told me he was beginning to feel overwhelmed, and said he wanted to “quit his job, go on disability, and possibly have himself committed.” I promised that I would support his choice no matter what and would always be there, but, days later, he changed his tune and everything was fine. Looking back, I wish I had known this was a red flag.

There he was, my first love, not only back in my life but back with me. We were building a new relationship, different and better, planning adult things together. But something wasn’t right. He started sleeping more and wouldn’t communicate for a day here and there, and it lasted for a few weeks. I remember on Monday, April 7th, 2014, he and I spoke for hours and made plans to spend time together on Wednesday when we both had time after work. I was with my friend at the time and told him I didn’t understand why he was begging to just see me that night—should I just invite him here? How will he find us? I would give anything to go back to that day and just tell him how to get to me. When the conversation stopped, I turned to my friend and said, “Why didn’t you tell me I was so in love with him? I should just tell him, shouldn’t I?” Excited that I finally realized my feelings, my friend and I sat making plans for how to share my love and I went to sleep that night feeling content. No word the next day, as usual. I assumed my beautiful love was angry that I wasn’t able to see him the night before and since I would be seeing him the next day, why bother making contact until it came time to make plans, right? I spent the whole day nervously planning my outfit, how to word things. I was scared.

No word on Wednesday.

I sat down on my computer that night to see if he had posted on Facebook and was just ignoring me, and that’s when I saw “RIP little buddy.” Confused, I called my friend who suggested I type his name in to Google, to see if perhaps there had been an accident. When Google loaded and I saw the first article, “man identified in bridge jump,” I screamed and begged my friend to open the article and confirm what I knew was true: he had died by suicide.

Though we spoke, sometimes at length, about our mutual experiences with depression, and his behavior had been erratic at the end, he never shared his thoughts on dying or the plan I came to learn that he had been constructing for years. As the days after his suicide went on, I went in to shut down mode. Unable to breathe, think or function in general, I fell in to the absolute worst depression I had experienced.

From my years of therapy, I knew I couldn’t do this alone. I called a grief counselor and joined a support group for people that lost a loved one to suicide. I read up on Bipolar Disorder and tried to do things that eased my pain, such as writing him a letter every single day for a year. I released balloons, I made silly videos, I forced myself to socialize when all I wanted to do was be sucked in to oblivion. I orchestrated a walk team for the local Out of the Darkness suicide prevention initiative, and, with the help of his family, raised over $10,000 that was donated in his memory.

But it didn’t seem enough. Before he passed away, I told him of my dreams of working with mental illness and eventually starting my own non-profit. The most supportive, he once wrote in an email that it was a brilliant idea that would benefit the world, thanking me “in advance, for helping the human race.” After his suicide, I felt too weak to be able to help others but slowly found myself reaching out through peer support, finding others who were battling depression and helping a few stop the act of taking their life as they were in process. It felt amazing, but not enough. I had to keep true to my word, and one morning, in August of 2016, I decided to go back to school to earn my master’s in psychology and was accepted this spring, three days before the three year anniversary of his suicide, in to a top program for just that. Still actively participating in suicide prevention awareness, education, and advocacy, I have hosted my own walks, and recently became the moderator for a peer support group to those bereaved by suicide loss. I’ve become a public speaker for a large mental health organization in which I not only educate about mental illness and suicide, but share my own struggles. I’ve written and published articles—writing has always been my best catharsis—and even filmed for a project about my own experiences living with major depressive disorder. I plan on continuing grad school to get my Psy.D with a focus on Bipolar Disorder research with a sub-focus on suicidality and addiction. By actively pursuing these things I am, yes, furthering my career, but I am also helping myself find the light in the perpetual darkness that has followed me since my first love passed.

The best way I have found to get out of this place is to be a part of the solution. To keep fighting for my life and millions of others who, like myself, struggle not only with depression but the loss of a loved one to suicide. I believe that we can make something beautiful come from tragedy, and what better way to honor my first love’s life than to help others stay here? To stay here myself? He wanted to spend the rest of his life with me in it, and, for him, I plan to live the best life possible for the rest of mine.

Danielle Glick is a 34-year-old writer and student based out of Connecticut. Currently working towards her Master’s in Psychology at Sacred Heart University, she is very active about promoting mental health awareness and suicide prevention in her community working diligently in advocacy and public education with groups such as AFSP and NAMI. Working on her first book, Danielle hopes to inspire others to share their story as to break down the stigmas that surround mental illness and addiction. She would be more than happy to hear from you – check her out on Instagram @Danielle_Glick or feel free to send her a message on Facebook.

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Narrative Essay Sample: “My First Love”

Love is in the air, love is everywhere!

First feelings are always special, new, unexplored, coupled with childish innocence and a pure vision of the world.

It may sound ridiculous, but the fist time I felt that I’m alive, was the moment I felt in love for the first time. It was long time ago, at the village of my grandparents. I was 7-year-old boy and parents brought me to grandma for the whole summer. She was a 7-year-old girl, a granddaughter of my grandmother’s friend. We lived nearby and grandmothers often visited each other. The first time I saw her, I decided that she was the most perfect human being on the earth. The only presence of her nearby made my feel happy and delighted. Despite of my young age, I’ve understood that the world is made of love and it’s one of reasons that inspires mankind to live and create. I even have written my first poem:

The moment I wake up I think of love The purity and gloss About you and come across This light is you I love you!

We spent much time together, we had endless themes to talk about! In the garden we had a special place, where we dreamed and talked. One day I climbed on the biggest apple tree to pick ripe apples for her and cut out hearts on them. This basket of love apples should be my love confession. While I was doing this, I didn’t mention that she came and was sitting and watching me for a while. I felt that she hugged me from the back and we continued sitting side-by-side and eating those love apples. And at the end we kissed. It was funny and unusually. From those time we haven’t kissed, but kept warm relations. When I returned to my hometown, we wrote each other more than a year, but one day she didn’t answer.

I like to pick this memory from my pocket on a nasty day, and life turns bright. The memories are so deep and clear, as I’m still a little boy, hanging around the gardens and singing the beautiful song about love.

This sample is a demonstration of how an essay should be written. Our writer created this essay in order to show in what way we write narrative essays. If you don’t want to write your essay, you can use our help. We assist students from all over the world. The writer can be easily contacted through the chat, so if you have any questions about the order, you can ask them.

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Love: My Personal Experience

When it comes to life, everyone has different experiences, including the feeling of first love. Love is a strong emotion that can be felt in various ways and degrees. Personally, my experience with first love was more romantic and emotionally uplifting than any other I had ever encountered.

Both the adoration and the feeling were mutual, captivating yet painful. Our journey commenced on a sunny November day, with oak tree leaves falling like raindrops as I ventured down the winding road towards our ordinary high school.

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On a Tuesday, I caught sight of Janice Marie Calloway. She donned a pink sweater with a touch of purple, and her jeans hugged her every curve. Her caramel brown eyes had an enchanting effect on me.

I was amazed by the stunning sight before me. Her skin had a beautiful cocoa hue, and she emitted a delightful fruity scent that filled every room. Additionally, she had jet black hair adorned with lovely tight curls.

Janice possessed a smile capable of crumbling any man. Her walk was fierce and threatening, with the potential to cause great harm if encountered too closely. The initial encounter between us is permanently etched into my memory.

I can still hear the loud throb of my heart in my chest as her gaze met mine in the cramped room. Our eyes locked as she approached me, and a smile materialized on her lips, solidifying that instant. It took me a whole year to initiate a conversation with her. Eventually, we developed a deep bond as best friends, and nothing further.

Accepting the truth that I loved someone who considered me just a friend proved to be challenging. I embraced her experiences and ideas as my own, unintentionally adopting her perspective. It felt like an unbalanced dynamic, with only myself harboring authentic emotions.

Despite her lack of awareness of my responses to her interactions with others, everyone believed that there was a strong bond between us. She found amusement in causing me jealousy, which made me realize how possessive she had turned me into. However, my world was shattered when she revealed her plans to leave and the uncertainty of ever coming back.

My mouth and heart sank, leaving me numb from head to toe as if my blood had stopped flowing. A multitude of thoughts flooded my mind.

Feeling lost and betrayed, I consider the possibility of navigating life without her. The reasons for her actions remain uncertain, causing me to ponder on what I may have done to push her away. My mood sinks into sadness. However, just as I begin to lift my head, she surprises me with a hug and whispers, “I’ll miss you, my friend.” As I look up, I catch a fleeting glimpse of her departing, forever etching that moment in my memory.

From that moment on, I realized that a major change awaited me. She vanished from my life and as time passed, we drifted apart. I found myself alone, dedicating hours to contemplating her absence and reflecting upon countless unanswered inquiries.

Although she has returned, the love of my life is no longer present. My emotions almost vanished when she departed, but remnants of our past feelings continue to plague me. Now that she’s back, it is her who craves my kisses after our intense initial embrace. It is her heart that breaks apart. I promise myself not to shed tears again.

Despite my desire for her to disappear from my life once more, she persists in staying. Each time she returns, I am unable to resist falling into her arms and regressing into the vulnerable child I once was. This continuous cycle of her presence is causing immense emotional turmoil, leaving me feeling utterly broken. Disappointment permeates every facet of my existence.

Now that you witness the transformation of a beautiful sensation into a collection of emotional calamities, do you comprehend the power of love over an individual? It is possible that you grasp its impact, or perhaps you do not. Each person undergoes the experience of love in diverse manners, and there may exist differing opinions regarding this matter.

In the end, it is irrelevant if your type of love conforms to a specific classification. Love is an individual experience that resides deep within. The crucial factor is that it brings about feelings of joy and contentment. When two people love one another, animosity ceases to exist.

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English Essay on “My First Love” English Essay-Paragraph-Speech for Class 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 CBSE Students and competitive Examination.

My First Love

“One could fall in love many times during the course of a Lifetime, but the first rush of love always holds a special place in our hearts.” These words sum it all up.

When a child is born, a mother gets a scrapbook and religiously notes down the baby’s ‘firsts’. The first time you do anything in your life leaves a mark on you and first love leaves that lovely mark in your heart. Surprisingly, people remember their first love even if it was as early as grade one! Well, that should tell you how strong, emotions associated with first love are! It is the novelty of the feeling that makes it so special and unforgettable. My first love like all first loves was sweet and special. I was going through so many emotions all at once. It was also to be kept under wraps, which made it more exciting. There was a certain amount of awkwardness as well and I tried so hard to be lady like- it was difficult! When you are in love there is a perpetual blush on your face and whether anyone else notices it, I do not know, but mothers do. I remember being questioned and the way I got on the defensive. Well, with time you move on but that lox c remains as fresh as it was.

The first love of your life seldom has a future as both are young and naive but it is a very special experience-like none other.

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Lilly Dancyger on First Love and the Friendships that Made (and Sustained) Her

The author discusses her new essay collection and proposes a new way of approaching self-understanding.

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“It felt strange to talk about that part of my life without going into all those relationships, because they really were the most important thing in my life at that time,” Dancyger says when we meet over Zoom in early May. Still, she maintains, the book needed to shave its excess. She couldn’t fill every other page with odes to her roommates and confidants, however substantial their influence in her youth. “As a consolation to myself,” she says, “I was like, ‘You can write about them later, you know?’”

Dancyger kept that promise. Her latest book, First Love: Essays on Friendship — out now from Dial Press —is a tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting, a way of assembling tools to compose (and improve) a self. The essays draw from Dancyger’s own life without any gloss or euphemism: The author summons vivid vignettes from her tempestuous youth in New York City; her agony following the death of her beloved cousin Sabina, who was murdered in her early 20s; and her self-reconstruction as a “hypercompetent” author and academic after having dropped out of high school in her formative years. Throughout each of these memories resides a dear friend, often a handful of them, each of whom shaped Dancyger’s understanding of her world, etching her concepts of morality and femininity and creativity into bone. This approach makes First Love more of a memoir-in-essays than a traditional work of cultural criticism, and yet Dancyger makes a remarkable hybrid of the two genres, weaving in references to Sylvia Plath, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures , Janis Joplin, and In Cold Blood to make salient points about sisterhood in the age of “sad girl” Tumblr, the true-crime boom, and the iPhone camera.

“I wanted to look outward and take a broader view,” Dancyger says. “Each close relationship in my life is an entryway into a different aspect of myself, a different way of being in the world, so I thought each of these essays could use the relationship to open up and talk about something else.”

Ahead, Dancyger discusses her approach to the enormous topic of sisterly love, and argues for the power of surrounding yourself with people who bring out “different versions” of your personality.

First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger

A lot of essay collections are broadly topical, looping in pieces of the author’s personal experience but keeping the focus on wide-lens cultural criticism. you employ the opposite tactic: your essays are each rooted first and foremost in memoir. why did that feel like the correct way for you to format first love .

Anything that reaches for objectivity is less compelling to me as a writer. Even in the pieces in this book that do go beyond the personal and say something larger about culture and about existing in the world as a woman—they’re all still very subjective. They’re all still very much about my experience of those things, because it’s hard enough to speak on my own experience with authority.

I’m not trying to speak for anybody else or be at all prescriptive. This never was going to be a definitive book about friendship, because I don’t think I could write a definitive book about friendship. I can only write about my own friendships and hope that readers see themselves reflected in it. That feels very different to me than saying, “This is what friendship is.”

I appreciate that instinct. I do think many authors are encouraged, for better or worse, to become the ultimate experts on a topic, and I don’t know how possible that is every time.

I mean, I’m a millennial New Yorker, white, a Jewish only child. My experience of friendship is going to be very different from anybody else’s.

I’m curious about how you decided which specific essays—and even which specific relationships—to feature.

Choosing which relationships to include really didn’t have anything to do with which relationships are more impactful or significant in my life. It really was about which relationships made my wheels turn in an interesting way; which relationships I had something compelling to say about. With some that was very clear right away, and with some—okay, there are a couple in there where I was like, This person has to be in there. What can I say about this person? And went looking for the topic based on the fact that it would be weird to leave whoever out. There also were several that I planned and thought about and even drafted, but they just didn’t make the cut on a craft or quality level, even if the relationship was important, the idea compelling.

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In the book, you highlight how the lines between platonic love and romantic love are often blurrier than some care to admit, because of that desire to be so fully consumed by your friends—especially when you’re young. That feeling is so potent, and also so misunderstood.

Absolutely, and I felt a little bit of that, too. [The intensity of the feeling] is not embarrassing , but it’s vulnerable.

It’s just less expected, I think, to spend time articulating how intensely you love your friends. I put that stuff down on the page and then I gave it to the people I had been writing about, and there was a little bit of—I don’t know, a feeling of being exposed. But, also, I wouldn’t have had those stories to tell or had that depth of emotion to express if I didn’t have the kinds of relationships where I could write a long essay about how much I love them, and send it to them and not feel embarrassed. The friends that I did send these essays to responded in really lovely ways, but yeah, I think it is not usual, right? And that’s why [writing the book] felt necessary.

Do you feel as though we’re in an era where these stories about friendship are taking more of a central focus, both in publishing and in Hollywood? Or does it still feel as though platonic love is brushed aside in favor of romance?

Once I started writing about this, I became much more aware of every article, every show, and it does kind of feel like we’re having a cultural moment right now where people are talking more about the importance of friendship, which is great. But I think cultural change happens slowly. So friendship is “having a moment” right now, but that doesn’t mean that these deeply entrenched social norms about who we actually prioritize in our lives, when it comes down to it, have changed overnight.

There’s so much lip service paid to, ‘Oh, this TV show is highlighting how central friendships are to our lives,’ which is true, but is that actually reflected in the way our society is set up? The way that we live? The way that we parent?

There’s a difference between loving your friends and actually holding space in your life for them to be a priority.

And I don’t blame people who don’t do that, necessarily, because it’s hard. Everything is set up for you not to do that, right? Like you go to the hospital, and who’s allowed to visit you, right? It’s not enough to say, “I’m her best friend. Let me in.” You’ll be brushed aside.

I loved your essay titled “Portraiture,” about your friend’s photos of you and how they impacted your self-perception. It made me wonder: In your opinion, how much of a deep, intimate friendship is about seeing yourself reflected, versus really seeing the other person? Is it a perfect blend of both?

I think it’s both. I think that seeing the other person clearly gives you a window into a version of yourself that you could be, and so the relationship is who you are in that context with that person. The question of which of those things do we value and want to hold on to is maybe open to debate.

Also, I am a Gemini, so I think maybe I have an extreme version of that, where I really do feel like I exist as a different version of myself with each person that I’m close to. But not in a false way! I feel like when people talk about this, often it sounds like a Talented Mr. Ripley situation, where you’re intentionally putting on an act, but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that there is that aspect of you existing already, and different people access or wake up or connect to those different parts of yourself.

.css-1aear8u:before{margin:0 auto 0.9375rem;width:34px;height:25px;content:'';display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-1aear8u:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/elle/static/images/quote.fddce92.svg);} .css-1bvxk2j{font-family:SaolDisplay,SaolDisplay-fallback,SaolDisplay-roboto,SaolDisplay-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1bvxk2j b,.css-1bvxk2j strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1bvxk2j em,.css-1bvxk2j i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1bvxk2j i,.css-1bvxk2j em{font-style:italic;} That’s what we want most as human beings, I think, right? To be seen and known and loved for all the different versions of ourselves.”

That’s a lot of what the thrill of connecting with someone in a really intense way is— maybe that person’s connecting with a part of you that has never really been witnessed or engaged with before. And that’s what we want most as human beings, I think, right? To be seen and known and loved for all the different versions of ourselves.

That’s part of where the limitation of the precedents we give to romantic love comes in: this expectation that one person should see and understand and love and speak to every single aspect of you. I just don’t think that’s real and possible. There’s a version of me that I am at home with my spouse, and that is a version of me that I’m comfortable being most of the time. Maybe that’s what we pick a significant other based on, like, “Okay, this is the default, main relationship feeling that I’m happy to inhabit and live in most of the time.” But I still crave those connections with the people who are important in my life. I still need to go and visit a close friend and go be this other version of myself for a while.

At the risk of sounding wildly cliché, it is so much harder to be our “full selves” than we often care to realize. There’s so many layers to who we are that we do need to surround ourselves with people who draw out different elements. That’s not a negative thing.

And that doesn’t mean any of those elements are less authentic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Book Review: Memoirist Lilly Dancyger’s penetrating essays explore the power of female friendships

This cover image released by Dial Press shows “First Love” by Lilly Dancyger. (Dial Press via AP)

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Who means more to you — your friends or your lovers? In a vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, Lilly Dancyger explores the powerful role that female friendships played in her chaotic upbringing marked by her parents’ heroin use and her father’s untimely death when she was only 12.

“First Love: Essays on Friendship” begins with a beautiful paean to her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20 on her way home from a club. As little kids, their older relatives used to call them Snow White and Rose Red after the Grimm’s fairy tale, “two sisters who are not rivals or foils, but simply love each other.”

That simple, uncomplicated love would become the template for a series of subsequent relationships with girls and women that helped her survive her self-destructive adolescence and provided unconditional support as she scrambled to create a new identity as a “hypercompetent” writer, teacher and editor. “It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own,” she writes in the title essay “First Love.”

The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.

For instance, she examines the 1994 Peter Jackson film, “Heavenly Creatures,” based on the true story of two teenage girls who bludgeoned to death one of their mothers. And in the essay “Sad Girls,” about the suicide of a close friend, she analyzes the allure of self-destructive figures like Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin to a certain type of teen, including herself, who wallows in sadness and wants to make sure “the world knew we were in pain.”

In the last essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” Dancyger considers the runaway popularity of true crime stories as she tries to explain her decision not to attend the trial of the man charged with killing her cousin — even though she was trained as a journalist and wrote a well-regarded book about her late father that relied on investigative reporting. “When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all,” she says. “It was a love story.”

Readers can be thankful that it did.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Memoirist Lilly Dancyger’s Penetrating Essays Explore the Power of Female Friendships

Please try again

Who means more to you — your friends or your lovers? In a vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, Lilly Dancyger explores the powerful role that female friendships played in her chaotic upbringing marked by her parents’ heroin use and her father’s untimely death when she was only 12.

First Love: Essays on Friendship begins with a beautiful paean to her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20 on her way home from a club. As little kids, their older relatives used to call them Snow White and Rose Red after the Grimm’s fairy tale, “two sisters who are not rivals or foils, but simply love each other.”

That simple, uncomplicated love would become the template for a series of subsequent relationships with girls and women that helped her survive her self-destructive adolescence and provided unconditional support as she scrambled to create a new identity as a “hypercompetent” writer, teacher and editor. “It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own,” she writes in the title essay “First Love.”

The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.

For instance, she examines the 1994 Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures , based on the true story of two teenage girls who bludgeoned to death one of their mothers. And in the essay “Sad Girls,” about the suicide of a close friend, she analyzes the allure of self-destructive figures like Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin to a certain type of teen, including herself, who wallows in sadness and wants to make sure “the world knew we were in pain.”

In the last essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” Dancyger considers the runaway popularity of true crime stories as she tries to explain her decision not to attend the trial of the man charged with killing her cousin — even though she was trained as a journalist and wrote a well-regarded book about her late father that relied on investigative reporting. “When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all,” she says. “It was a love story.”

Readers can be thankful that it did.

‘ First Love: Essays on Friendship ’ by Lilly Dancyger is released on May 7, 2024 via The Dial Press.

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Romance isn’t just for fairytales.

Psychologists explain how romantics who believe in “love at first kiss” allow their expectations to influence their love lives.

People with idealized beliefs of romance are more likely to place high importance on relationship milestones like a first kiss — but they’re not just living in a fairytale.

Narratives that emphasize the importance of chemistry, connection and experiencing “butterflies” have been proven to positively influence people’s love stories.

A recent study, published in Frontiers in Psychology , explained how first kiss beliefs influence people’s process of falling in love and chances of riding off into the sunset with their partner.

For one, the researchers found that a first kiss can be a tool for “mate selection” as leaning in for a smooch allows you to breathe in your partner’s scent, which can be an indicator of a person’s health.

After that initial peck, first kiss beliefs shape lovers’ perceptions of romance and influence the course and quality of a relationship.

Considering your partner a good kisser and leaning in to kiss them often as the relationship continues isn’t a desperate call for affection but a sign of sexual and relationship satisfaction, the study found.

Being a romantic isn’t for the young and naive.

People who have idealized romantic expectations, such as believing in the importance of a first kiss, are also more likely to overlook a partner’s flaws, researchers said.

This willingness to idolize their partner isn’t just a fantasy but was found to help maintain relationship satisfaction and commitment leading to longer-lasting relationships.

However, for some romantics, placing too high an importance on these “first kiss beliefs” can contribute to more unrealistic expectations setting their relationships up for failure.

But who are these romantics?

People with anxious attachment styles, commonly identified by a fear of abandonment and dependency on partners, were found to be more likely than those with more secure attachment styles to hold these ideals as a validation of their worthiness and desirability.

However, there is a line between believing in these romantic ideals and delusion as pinning after an unrequited love can turn from a romantic daydream to an unhealthy obsession .

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