NoJoMo Day #23 - First Love in The Long and Winding Road

Day Twenty Three: Who was the first person you fell in love with?

Ah, sweet love.

I married the first person I fell in love with. Maybe that’s why the marriage didn’t last. I was very young and I thought that’s what you did when you fell in love – you got married.

I met him on Friday the 13th of November, 1970. I had just graduated from high school in June and I was working as a telephone operator at New Jersey Bell Telephone. This was in the last days of an operator actually sitting at a switchboard and connecting long distance calls for people by plugging a wire into the correct slot and making the call for them. It actually was a fun job because I became very good friends with several other girls who were all hired the same week I was hired. We were all the same age – in fact, the two that I ended up sharing an apartment with, were exactly my age. Our birthdays were 3 days in a row. I still think of them every year on my birthday.

We weren’t supposed to have personal conversations with any of the customers we talked to, but of course we did, even though our supervisor could be listening in at any time. One night there was a guy making a lot of calls from a pay phone, so at the end of each call he would signal for me to come back on the line to connect his next call. We started chatting, one thing led to another, and I eventually agreed to meet him for a drink. We ended up dating for several months, but he made me feel suffocated because he would show up at my house (I still lived with my parents) unexpectedly and he’d be there when I got home from work, usually he was playing chess with my father.

Well, eventually, as they will do between an 18 year old girl and a 23 year old guy, things started progressing physically and there was a lot of gentle pressure on me to keep going further, but I was unsure. After a lot of thought, I decided that I didn’t love him and therefore I wasn’t going to move things along physically, so I broke up with him. He took it pretty hard.

For the next couple of weeks I wavered back and forth, missing him and wondering if I’d made a mistake breaking up with him. In the midst of those emotions, I met Rick. At least, that’s what I’ll call him. It’s funny – the girl who introduced us, was his ex-girlfriend. She was now dating one of his good friends. I went with her to see her boyfriend this one night, and Rick was there. While my friend and her boyfriend sat in a corner kissing and whispering and giggling, that left Rick and me in a bit of an awkward position of sitting there trying to make conversation. I was tongue tied because I was really attracted to him. So we went back and forth with our awkward conversation and intermittent silences. And finally my friend was ready for us to leave. As we were leaving, Rick stopped me and asked me if I’d like to go out the next night. My first thought was that I couldn’t admit I was available on a Saturday night on just 24 hours’ notice! So I responded “Well, I just broke up with my boyfriend” and he said “So what does that mean?”. I said it meant I wasn’t doing anything the next night and I would go out with him.

Things moved quickly from there. Too quickly. By New Year’s we were living together, by April we were engaged, and we got married in August. I was 2 weeks away from my 19th birthday and he was close to his 22nd birthday.

You all know we had a lot of ups and downs during the 30 years we were married, but I did always love him and I know he always loved me. We just shouldn’t have been together.

I said I married the first person I fell in love with. He wasn’t the last person I fell in love with. And when I fell in love with the second guy, I knew that the love I felt for Rick wasn’t the same. But it was too late.