My initial account of first love between the beetle-browed boy and the radiant girl is culled from the early pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita that ‘Confession of a White, Widowed Male’. Here the ‘demented diarist’, the notorious Humbert Humbert, having died in legal captivity and asked in his will for his memoirs to be published, recounts his adolescent passion for Annabel Leigh, the girl-child who is a precursor to Lolita, his later more outrageously illicit lover. Indeed, as Humbert Humbert underlines, without the time-stopped Annabel and the imprint she left on him, ‘there might have been no Lolita at all’.
First love, as the poets, songwriters, filmmakers and chroniclers tell us again and again, can be the most intense of life’s passions. The heightened perceptions, the tumultuous sensitivities of adolescence, the wakening sense that anything and everything is possible, play into its power. ‘It is a commonplace,’ Stendhal, the great French Romantic realist wrote in his book On Love, ‘that sixteen is an age which thirsts for love’. The rub is that it’s also an age that ‘is not excessively particular about what beverage chance may provide.’ As yet himself unformed, the teenager’s love object can be equally fluid and shifting–like Proust’s Marcel, enraptured by all the girls ‘in a budding grove’ who race by on their bicycles, conferring glamour as they go, yet seem hardly distinguishable from one another, until one in particular leaps to his attention. Biologically driven, suffused with desire which may have no immediate object, alive to nature and to sensation, filled with expectation and an inwardness through which the lyrics of pop songs, stories or poetry play, the dreamy adolescent is ripe for passion of turbulent proportions.
The narrator of Turgenev’s novella, First Love, captures the febrile state with precision:
I knew a great deal of poetry by heart; my blood was in a ferment and my heart ached–so sweetly and absurdly; I was all hope and anticipation, was a little frightened of something, and full of wonder at everything, and was on the tiptoe of expectation; my imagination played continually fluttering rapidly about the same fancies, like martins about a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed, was sad, even wept… At that time the image of woman, the vision of love, scarcely ever arose in definite shape in my brain; but in all I thought, in all I felt, lay hidden a half-conscious, shamefaced presentiment of something new, unutterably sweet, feminine…
When the slender, flirtatious and slightly cruel twenty-one-year-old Princess Zinaida comes to live nearby and shows him a little favour, Turgenev’s sixteen-year-old hero, Voldemar, tumbles into the ‘melting bliss of the first raptures of love’. In that chaos of emotions, that keen awareness through all the senses, which all lovers recognize, pleasure and pain walk hand in hand: ‘I spent whole days thinking intensely about her… I pined when away… but in her presence I was no better off. I was jealous; I was conscious of my insignificance; I was stupidly sulky or stupidly abject, and, all the same, an invincible force drew me to her…’ One day, obeying the incomprehensible and desired Zinaida’s careless command, Voldemar jumps off a high wall. In his state of semi-consciousness he feels her covering his face with kisses, hears her say she loves him. His bliss is total.
If Turgenev’s young lover sounds like a hopelessly old-fashioned romantic hero, here’s an account from a seventeen-year-old contemporary Londoner: ‘When I am with her… I get grabbed by a feeling and get thrown around,’ he tells his therapist, evoking the roller-coaster of emotions that attend his first love. The girl is so perfect for him that they are one and he no longer knows where his own body ends and hers begins: ‘When we are in her room nothing else matters. I forget about everything. Sometimes hours afterwards I notice that I was lying uncomfortably, like the edge of the bed has cut into my arm, but I don’t even notice that. It’s like magic. Is that normal?’
Whatever the verdict on ‘normality’, it’s clear that the experience is hardly unusual.
Adolescence is a time of labile intensity. Giddy heights reached when the desired one acknowledges you, plunge as quickly into depths of rejection when he doesn’t. Yearning is a predominant emotion and can be so painful as to shade into morbidity. Suicidal thoughts stalk the young lover. Death seems a warm, embracing oblivion, as attractive as the living ‘other’ who will shatter the discomfort and banality of the quotidian. A sense of cocooned isolation persists through these years, even within the floating groups of friends. Most teenagers, whatever they may seem from the outside, feel something in common with Morrissey’s ‘half a person’, whether ‘sixteen, clumsy and shy’ or fifteen, clumsy and fat. Desperate to break out of the childhood self the family, however good or bad, keeps structurally imprisoned in just that self, they sense that love is the consummate escape artist. Only in the gaze or embrace of the ‘other’ can the butterfly inside them be recognized and take wing.
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that the potency of first love lies in the particularly intense way it brings both body and imagination into play. In adolescence, a set of physical cravings upon which our survival literally depends are elaborated into feelings, beliefs, thoughts–indeed, a whole series of stories and ideas which have the meeting of two people at their core. It’s ‘an imaginative elaboration of physical functions’. Carnal desire transports the lovers into a heightened world and everything in that world takes on powerful new meanings.
The shape of the stories the lovers tell themselves can be romantic, spiritual, marital or, in our ironic times, confined to a sexual or even a chemical and neural register. Narratives, images, the language of reflection we give to love are always already there in our culture and our history. Our desire may sing of beauty, of seduction and challenges overcome, a meeting of true minds or a laddish conquest, or the self-abnegating pain of terrible longing. We project all our wishes on to the desired one and make them the keepers of our happiness and our solace.
This passionate, sexually charged love is in no simple way a mere invention of the individualist West or the idealizations of romance. Lovers in all cultures attribute inordinate power to the beloved. Poetry extolling passion’s raptures and ills has been found amongst Egyptian papyri and on vase fragments dating back to 1000 BC. Scholars agree that such poetry was part of an oral culture in Southeast Asia and India, and was shared through trade routes. ‘The sight of her makes me well!… Her speaking makes me strong,’ hymns one Egyptian lover, underscoring the ‘love as sickness’ theme. And another, exulting that love gives him strength, chants
My heart bounds in its place,
Like the red fish in its pond.
O night, be mine for ever,
Now that my queen has come!
The Chinese legend of the ‘Butterfly Lovers’, adapted in traditional opera, dates back to the late Tang Dynasty (618–907). It tells the tale of a young woman, Zhu Yingtai, who takes on a male identity to pursue her studies in a distant city. Here she meets Liang Shanbo, a fellow student. They become inseparable friends. When a parental order comes for Zhu to return home, she begs Liang to visit her–so that he can meet her younger sister. He does and is overjoyed to discover her true identity. They vow eternal love, but Zhu has been betrothed by her wealthy family to another man. Forced apart, Liang pines away to die of a broken heart. Learning of his death on her wedding day, Zhu’s wedding procession takes her to his grave. Her tears move heaven and earth. The ground cracks open and she leaps in to die beside him. But love conquers. The two are miraculously transformed into butterflies and flutter away together, never to be separated again.
Sanskrit literature abounds in tales of passionate, sensuous love, saturated in romantic longing. The cow-herding maiden, Radha, grows up with Krishna: the two play, fight, dance together and never want to be parted, but the world pulls them apart. He leaves to embark on great battles and adventures, as well as the search for virtue. He becomes lord of the universe. Radha waits. She waits for him through his marriage to two other women, through the raising of a family. But at last, in great bliss, the two lovers are reunited and marry in front of
a vast cohort, which includes all the gods and goddesses of heaven.
The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, listening to the spontaneous outpourings, gossip and tales of the Trobriand Islanders, observed: ‘Love is a passion to the Melanesian as to the European and torments mind and body to a greater or lesser extent; it leads to many an impasse, scandal or tragedy; more rarely, it illuminates life and makes the heart expand and overflow with joy.’
Whatever the structuring narrative and its personal inflections, this passionate young love, both carnal and soulful, is an agent of change, while its violent intensity imprints the experience on mind and body alike.
Coup de Foudre
One of my informants, let’s call her Clio, an attractive and successful woman of thirty-five, self-avowedly a romantic, was emphatically marked by her experience of first love. The daughter of American parents who worked in Southeast Asia, she was sent to an English boarding school at the age of fourteen in the early 1980s. She had almost no experience of sex, though, of course, she had some received knowledge. She had kissed before, yet despite her enthusiasm for the act in make-believe (she had, as a child, played with her Ken and Barbie dolls and left them in wild compromising positions about the house), the actual act had always filled her with disgust. She had always been taught by her mother to think of sex and love as a pair.
On the first day of school in the foreign–and one can only imagine lonely–country that England was for her, she saw a boy in the common room. Their eyes met. She remembers his gestures minutely, though she can’t any longer picture his face: he had a trilby hat and he flung it and his coat on to a chair. Everything grew vibrant, as if a light had been switched on. She knew she was in love.
It is worth pausing over this description of the moment the French call the coup de foudre, the lightning bolt that signals falling in love. The ‘look’ of the loved one may be central, as all those Renaissance sonnets hymning the beloved’s eyes and lips tell us; or Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet who opines, ‘young men’s love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes’. Today’s advertising industry similarly relies on manifest beauty to sell its products. It’s backed up in this by psychological research which shows that individuals regularly rate as most attractive features that appear proportionate and symmetrical. In such experiments, the test subjects also regularly select out as desirable images that bear a relationship to parental features. Yet for all this, Clio, like so many others, cannot in retrospect picture the face of the beloved, not even in that crucial moment when the thunderbolt struck.
Proust, that acute and agonized observer of human foibles, remarks on this common enough phenomenon. His adolescent namesake hero is infatuated with Gilberte, whom he meets regularly in the tree-lined parklands of the Champs Élysées. Yet the actual face of his first love, while he is embroiled in passion, continually eludes him. Proust offers this explanation:
The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow… our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which yet endeavours to discover with the eyes alone what lies beyond them is over-indulgent to the myriad forms, to the different savours, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we immobilise. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of it are always blurred.
The ‘activity of all the senses at once’–which Clio described in her falling-in-love moment as ‘everything grew vibrant, as if a light had been switched on’–blurs sight. Love, it seems, is blind in more ways than the conventional one, that is, of choosing an object for our passions who may be far from socially convenient: it also blinds one to the very face our fantasies have singled out as the only possible object for our love. Even if we carry on thinking that the ‘look’ of the other is crucial to our love, it may be difficult to recapture the face of the beloved in memory. Here, too, one could speculate, is an echo from buried childhood perceptions of parental figures.
The simultaneous ‘activity of all the senses’, the vertigo of ‘falling’ in love, may also be what introduces the sensation of ‘for ever’ into such heady passion, whatever reason may simultaneously tell us. When the senses are all so keenly in play, the present is all, and it seems to stretch into infinity.
For a week, Clio and her boy teased and ribbed each other, listened to Billy Joel songs, stole outside to smoke secretly. Then inexplicably he ‘dumped’ her, didn’t speak to her for a month or more. When they finally met up again at a party, he invited her outside and kissed her. That was it.
Misunderstandings and hurdles in the path of love–a common trope in fictional treatments as in life–like prohibitions, can increase the desirability of union. Breaking the boundaries of the self is a difficult and sometimes frightening business. Fear walks hand in hand with a sense of adventure. Sensitivities are high, vulnerabilities in play, the slightest rejections are magnified. Fantasies and anticipation inevitably collide with a ‘real,’ who has through the very process of imaginative elaboration been idealized. The other may feel intimately familiar and yet is a stranger. Excitement, a sense of risk and hope are inevitably tinged with anxiety and blundering steps. Then, too, in the obsessiveness that love releases, family and often friends are cast aside, sometimes with fractious effect. So the path to love is rarely altogether easy.
For Clio and her boyfriend, the coming together after the period of estrangement was sheer joy. A group of friends had congregated at one of their houses for a week: they told the other parents, mostly abroad, that term was finishing a week later. Sex was ‘steamy’ and ‘wonderful’ from the start. For a whole year, they were blissful together, utterly wrapped up in one another.
Then the school authorities discovered them in flagrante. They were both summarily expelled, sent down like a teenage Adam and Eve from the garden of their delights. The term ‘falling in love’ seems already to hold a ‘fall’ in itself: a fall away from the quotidian, reasonable self, and a falling out, during which that mundane self is slowly and at least partially restored. For Clio, the vertigo of the falling out, the dislocation it entailed, was terrible. Her parents had recently moved to North Africa and didn’t yet have an address. The school kept her in quarantine, as if she were diseased, until they could be reached. On top of the ostracization came the headmistress’s threat of ‘virginity tests’ and warnings that she would contract cervical cancer. In the eighties, and indeed even today, the age-old mantra that sex is a dirty business, polluting girls in particular, is still in play side by side with a more permissive culture. When at last Clio’s mother was contacted, she grasped the situation instantly. But the terror of confronting her father remained: white lies, reasons and excuses had to be fabulated. In the midst of all this worry and displacement, Clio completely lost touch with her boyfriend.
She didn’t see him again until fifteen years later. Through the interim period, despite a series of other encounters and affairs, the experience of this first love stayed with her, never to be equalled in either intensity or ‘rightness’.
The pain of sudden separation inevitably played a part in the powerful hold of this first passion–a word which in its Christian resonances already entails suffering. Indeed, this kind of heightened love wraps pain into itself. As Simone de Beauvoir has so saliently noted: ‘pain is normally a part of the erotic frenzy: bodies that delight to be bodies for the joy they give each other, seek to find each other, to unite, to confront each other in every possible manner. There is in erotic love a tearing away from the self, transport, ecstasy; suffering also tears through the limits of the ego, it is transcendence, a paroxysm… the exquisite and the painful intermesh.’
Clio traced
her first love again when she was working in Southeast Asia. Now a successful executive in her early thirties, adept at Web searches, she recognized him from a review he had posted, despite the fact that thousands bore the same name as his. She sent him an email: he didn’t respond until three months later. She was then on the point of returning to England for a Christmas holiday. They met in a north London park: after fifteen minutes they were kissing and madly in love again, as if ‘time had folded in on itself’. Suddenly everything made sense for her; everything ‘fitted’. She thought, ‘This was it. This was happiness.’ It would never go away. She felt he was a part of her, no matter who or what he might have become.
He told her he had broken up with his wife just at the time that she had emailed him. (The little miracles of timing attend all accounts of romantic love, as do many other kinds of magical thinking that in the cold light of day, like horoscopes, are labelled ‘superstitious’.) He told her that she would meet his children: everything in their conversation was to do with a future in which they would be together. In that ‘for ever’ which heightened senses make of the present, she felt secure. They saw each other every day and when she had to return to her post abroad, she gave him an airline ticket to come and visit her in his Easter holiday. Meanwhile, they spoke daily across the distance and wrote passionate letters.
Then, three days before he was intended to fly, he rang to say he wouldn’t be coming. She was utterly devastated. She continued for years to gnaw away at explanations for his behaviour, for the split. Nor has she ever altogether recovered from the powerful emotions of this first love or found another to equal it.
What does Clio’s story tell us?
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 4
