"They say for every boy an'girl, there's just one love in this whole world, and I know I found mine...Young love first love, filled with true devotion," etc. Who sang that old song? I mean besides Perry Como. I'm not THAT old!

There's a piece in AARP magazine that comes to my mother-in-law this month that talks about get-togethers between old lovers, which appears to constitute an emerging trend instead of holding to its traditional place of occasional human interest stories and small-world anecdotes. To keep my terminology straight and facilitate understanding, by "get-togethers" I mean romantic liaison. By "old" I mean former (as in high school sweethearts after intervening decades, and by "lovers" I mean affection, not necessarily that the subjects had sexual relations in their previous acquaintance. Life can be so distracting, you know--marriage, family, career--that we forget about, submerge, repress, deny or simply act like we forget about those early, perhaps even first, important feelings. The article breezes us lightly past the various facilitatiing scenarios of reunion and vulnerability, mutual divorce, death of a spouse, retirement, empty nest syndrome. It even brushes uglier issues involving illicit affairs and abandonment of longstanding apparently normal family ties for the sake of recapturing...what? It seems unclear on that point. Something.

We know most of this already. Maybe not the statistics, but the fact that after a long but strange and troubled marriage, our divorced buddy hooked up with his old high school sweetheart and has a wonderful family with her now, that an acquaintance returned from a high school reunion in the Midwest to promptly divorce his wife and marry a former classmate, that (dare I say it) many of us may have longstanding concerns of our own that still await some kind of closure.

The part of the article that I found most interesting was a brief allusion to theories that our teenage attachements may have been etched upon our developing brain channels. Researchers say that we are in various ways somewhat hardwired by early learning and experiences. My impression has been that such patterning predates the years in which our concerns would be romantically inclined. Recent studies, however, indicate that in areas involving decision-making, teens may not exhibit sensible adult responses in part due to their brains not being fully formed and juiced with mature brain chemistries. One would hate to think that he were bound forever by old attachments due to erosion of the new-formed mental mountain into gullies or maybe even valleys represented by the wrinkles of the brain, and that that's why an old interest may revisit in the night behind the wheel on long road trips, but there seems to be emerging evidence that this is so. Or perhaps one would not hate to think it. There is a certain comforting, even justifying appeal to the theory, as with genetic studies involving predisposition toward alcoholism or obesity, for instance. Physiology trumps psychology, seeming on the surface to be simpler and therefore broaching less analysis. (Honey it's not my fault. I can't help myself. The Dr will back me up.) No matter how fuzzy, traditional psychological explanations tended to lay the matter more firmly on one's own doorstep.

Play mae some Peter, Paul & Mary (What's-Her-Name) or Gordon Lightfoot (Carefree Highway, Did She Mention My Name)or Geo Jones (He Stopped Loving Her Today)or Roy Orbeson (Crying) or Boston (More Than a Feeling) or Dolly Parton (I Will Always Love You) or Linda Ronstadt (I Think I'm Gonna Love You for a Long Long Time) or or the Animals (Bring (Your Sweet Lovin) on Back to Me) or Elvis (Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello) or, well, you get the picture. It may not make sense, but since most of these songs were not written or performed by kids (even back when they were popular) evidence is that the tendency to throw our thinking in reverse is universal enough. We have thought that songs of loss and rememberance and regret are generally related by the songwriter to recent heartaches that time subsequently healed, but this would not explain their continuing appeal to a middle-aged audience. They apparently touch (or continue to irritate--Hmm, that's another dimension of the subject) a common chronic raw nerve. Throw in a few decades of post-'60's evolution of entitlement thinking (what about my needs? I deserve to be happy, too) and removal of stigma (With half of all marriages ending in divorce, how bad can it be?), add a dash of general middle-aged craziness (Hey, I never owned a 'Vette before) by a free floating generation tenuously bound by the constraints of reality, add a liberal pinch of nostalgia (She was the prettiest girl in the world. Sigh) and you come up with all sorts of evidence that baby boomers who perceived they lacked closure in their time are now casting about to reconcile longstanding personal issues. The tendency is not all bad. There may well be emotional baggage that needs to be inspected and disposed. Many made early enemies of their government, their parents, their prospects. Boomer youngsters experienced a decade of war with more than its normal complement of side dishes of internal acrimony, defeatism, accusation and eventual outright defeat (regardless of the outcome on the actual battlefield) that stranded a generation in bitterness toward each other and authority and their general lot in life. Now, it is a time of unfinished business lacking in reconciliation with God due to youthful rebellion because they didn't want to embrace daddy's religion, with family because of longstanding feuds and bitterness. Many who just generally got tired of the struggle at some point and decided to shut the door on the tough issues, leaving the mess in the closet, are now rethinking in light of hard evidence of personal mortality--parents' fading health and our own advancing age. Indifferent time sets a limit on man's ability to hope to someday set things right, make amends, finish the sentence or the book, explain, apologize, forgive, ask, tell.

Perhaps the constand attack on agrarian values and the mid-century quickening pace of life left us a country of rootless searchers for the meaning of a youth too soon flown on the wings of adult decisions pushed down by social upheaval (identity, drugs, sex, war, etc. and premature knowledge of such issues). Perhaps boomers are the first generation on the land outside the halls of the truly wealthy to have had leisure time to contemplate or affluence to take up the quest to understand the true mysteries of buyer's and seller's remorse, or maybe it is the first generation so stoned and beset with outrageous causes that many missed half of what is now recognized as what might have been the most pleasantly memorable years of life. There is no doubt boomers are not the first generation to discover that life is too short to waste, but whether youth passes but once remains debatable in the minds of many. It may well be the first group so large with the time, will, opportunity and resources to go back and look around for the things of which we were deprived by the pace of earlier travels. Americans are looking as never before for birth parents and lost siblings, we contact old love interests and friends, we surgically erase the evidence of our aging, we inspect the frayed ends of long-severed connections, perhaps gingerly try the treacherous blackened planks of bridges we ourselves burned behind us along the way.

Whether the search will be profitable is generally questionable in my view, but there are no statistics on individual successes. Though the results may often resemble self-inflicted wounds, there appears to be a growing compulsion to take the plunge. Maybe we do program ourselves before we are competent to do so. Maybe previous generations' lifestyles laid out more stable and orderly paths. There were fewer forces to disrupt early progression into a predictable life, more probably even with one's first love in our grandparents', even our parents' times. (This, of course,is another way of speculating on the uncomfortable thought that coming out of those more orderly times which boomers may have ridiculed and found unjustly constrictive, their forebears may have been more mature, even emotionally healthier at the same ages. This is not new. Many boomers have come to the same conclusion, but it is all too easy to then simply blame prior generations for not protecting the kids, not preserving the environment, subscribing the foreign way, etc., and we're back where we started.) Perhaps a measure of emotional closure is essential in some ways to further progress. If there's anything to these theories, they speak of a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later kind of debt. Would that we were more capable and had more opportunity to tie up loose ends as they appear along the way, that we had less baggage to carry, some to the very end of life. ("Rosebud!")

Reshuffling the deck later in life, particularly in the area of renewal of ancient love interests, may indeed produce some winners and losers, but it has all the earmarks of gambling with the grocery money. I speculate upon the roots of the growing tendency to take the chance. I'm not at all sure just what those who do so expect to gain, how they define a win. Often, the participants probably are not sure either. Maybe motivation is like that of some marine life, and we humans jump and crash in order to try and shake loose the parasites that complicate our lives and cause us discomfort with which we are less able to cope as we age. Maybe we eventually become desperate enough for change to undertake it in hopes that the unknown will be better than our current situations (which really don't seem so bad overall by comparison with those of prior genererations). That the words "maybe" and "perhaps" predominate in my cogitation is telling to me, indicative of my own lack of closure about the subject, much less its matter. While Thomas Wolfe's famous assertion that "you can't go home again" must prove true in some respects, trends among boomers suggest that the desire to do that very thing is widespread and growing. It should shortly produce much more data on the subject with which to occupy sociologists and inquiring minds. However, knowledge of the trend's genesis and process, while of academic interest, will do little to alter its course.

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), August 12, 2004

Answers

It seems people get to an age where they suddenly realize they're not going to be here forever and are afraid they may have missed some part of life along the way (mid-life crisis). Personally I'd rather look to the future whatever it brings rather than dwelling in the past. After all if I'm going to wake up everyday with an old man I'd much rather it be the one I still see as an 18 year-old and who doesn't seem to notice my greying hair and wrinkles. :-)

-- Carol (c@oz.com), August 13, 2004.

Carol, you have hit on a separate issue (mid-life crisis) which may interplay as I mentiioned with the one at hand (tendency to renew long-lost first love interest). That you're still with the guy who sees you as an 18-year-old would indicate to me that you'd be outside the norm, one of those less-conflicted couples (as was more numerous in past generations) who was able to land that first love whose loss (evidence would indicate) continues to haunt and trouble increasing numbers of others. My inference is that most boomers grew up too fast, zoomed right past that and are now paying for it with regret, evidenced by growing tendencies to explore renewal of those lost ties. If you're from a disappearing farm/rural background, that also ties in with my current-generation-has-more-trouble-than-before thinking since I tend to blame some of the dissatisfaction with loss of the common sense, hard work and slower pace of rural life, as mentioned.

My theory on the arguably overarching separate issue of middle-aged crisis is that it comes on women much earlier (in their 20's) than men (usually in their 40's) and that "early onset" often results in divorce.

We'll see if Friends weigh in on the questions for discussion: 1) do most people share a strong general remembrance of an early "first" affection and 2) if so, do you think that such chunks of peach might have been put in the brain before the jello set, or do such feelings persist because we just want to hold onto them? Let's throw in 3) what about middle-aged-craziness--any general observations?

If we don't get some discussion, my thought is that I can answer the first two questions "yes" and "probably," because I'll take it as a sign that these feelings 1) exist and 2) people are in denial and/or such things are widely seen as too sensitive to discuss. Three's just a throw-down general interest item. Then there's also the possibility that 4) it's a dumb subject and nobody cares (I have trouble putting anything I come up with in that category for obvious reasons).

Cast your ballots here.

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), August 14, 2004.

(Boy-O-boy, am I looking forward to a mid-life crisis! I'm gonna buy me a Harley Fatboy, solid chrome you know, and go fetch Helen, then run away to Vegas were we'll probably end up with some sort of combined showgirl/trained mule magic act at the Sands Casino.)

--

Now, J, I think you've gone astray somewhat in maligning the boomers for much of this. Unrequited love, and the fascination with it, has been common to each generation. A generation ago, the story of Dante and Beatrice was the romantic rage, known and relished in parlor talk in every household with even a little of the newly accessible “book learning” of the early 20th century. Dante (Paradise Lost) fell young in love to Beatrice, who loved briefly then moved on. Dante watched Beatrice from a chaste distance his entire life, foregoing other romantic fulfillment in his dead-end but oh-so-noble infatuation. Beatrice, of course, went on with her life, married another and lived a life normal for her time, but the heartbreak of Dante and his ongoing devotion, inspired the daydreams of thousands of Victorian teens, whose jello, it seems, had not quite jelled yet, either.

But do we recall early loves throughout our adult lives because we just want to, or are we compelled to by cranial thought-tracks? Here again, I think the fond recollection of youth is not a recent development. Nor do I think it is an abnormal or immoral search to return to the pastures where we wish we had sown more wild oats. I still correspond with Lynn, who was the first girl I ever kissed, in the back seat of my brother’s car on the way home from church one October hill-country night. I guess that’s the magic of memories; I know she must have some grey in her hair by now, must have those few extra pounds, few wrinkles and all the rest, as do I, but in my mind she is still a smiling 15 year old girl. And, of course, I am a still a 15 year old boy, instilled with simple-minded courage. But, although she was my first love, she was not Beatrice, and I was not Dante.

So, perhaps the Dante-like devotion is something altogether different. Something unwittingly imprinted on our psyche, something unforgettable, non-deletable. I’m a believer in genetic memory, the intuition that compels us, like swallows to return to our own personal Capistranos. So, the idea of an embedded life-long tugging of unfulfilled romance, however content we may be with our lives, is certainly not beyond my pale of possibility. Sometimes I think that mankind has evolved in our intelligence to the point where we no longer recognize the knowledge inherent within our cells. In the words of Thoreau, “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”

-- middleaged Lon (if I live to 110!) (midlife@the.bayou), August 15, 2004.

Lon, would that my 15-year-old boyhood had been instilled with the simple minded courage of which you speak. I was shy and didn't experience my first kiss until after high school. By then "the" girl was gone. Lynn, huh. I never knew. Hmm. You old dog.

But it's nice to get some input on the brain-coded theory. You even introduce a new "hereditary" element. That would seem to border on predisposition. If so, it would tie in with studies and speculations about the roles of pheremones in attraction, things like that. Experiments have indicated there's something to it.

It also seems, whether physical or psychologically initiated, that the tendency to be imprinted is more evident in men, who seem to carry scars in a different way and longer than women (there are exceptions, but that's the way I see it). This would line up with your Dante and Beatrice. You could also refer to Huxley's Chrome Yellow (the characters, not confusing the issue by going into author's bio) or almost any of Fitzgerald's novels, The Great Gatsby being the most obvious. As for the early imprinting (if, indeed these examples don't apply to that as well), try Lord Byron, a non- fictional character, who apparently never got over youthful affection (in his case, unfortunately, for a half-sister for whom he fell as a young man after separate childhoods, which lends an obvious additional twist to the plot).

My mother-in-law had an uncle who lived with her parents most of his adult life. His intended was killed in a horse-riding accident, and never dated again. He was convinced there was no way he could do better, and obviously had decided not to settle for worse--better and worse to my mind being dictated by his ability to generate depth of feeling rather than the qualities of any prospective replacements.

I believe women are survivors, they may not be able to lift themselves off the floor physically for awhile at a broken heart, but when they do, it's usually shortly and to a new world with old hurts sealed off somehow to a degree that men can't manage. Newness overlays and obscures the old. Men may not go limp at the time, but can continue to actively mourn. Women create a new reality, if you will. Men drag the old along in parallel, sometimes for 40 years. But that's a Venus/Mars thing and not necessarily on the subject of adolescent imprinting except to note that young impressions seem to be stamped deeper upon the male of the species in this area.

Carol, your preference to keep looking to the future is a good example of this. Maybe women are more practical as well as optimistic. The children have to be fed. Men are free to feel so bad they underachieve right along, and maybe nobody even notices.

What if, beyond heredity, physiology, psychology and early-learning channels, there were even be a spiritual element, something involving predistinaion. We have paid lip service to all of these for years, heredity and predisposition (chemistry between people, someone's not my type), the early-learning, brain channel thing (AARP article that started this whole subject), psychology (I'm crazy about you, I can't get you out of my mind) and spiritual (we were meant to be together). Add environmental/ circumstantial (the moon, the music, the booze). It can (and does) all play into the mix. Maybe we're only talking about which thing predominates, not which thing is causative.

I vote for psychological. You can be attracted, have history, etc., but until you make the decision (openly or secretly), it's not a done deal. Once it IS a done deal, it's something one has to live with for the rest of his life, whether it comes to pass or not. Those things are set in concrete, come what may. They might as well be, and would show all the signs of, the physiological imprint at that point.

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), August 16, 2004.

Wow, J! You bring up so many interesting points, I hardly know where to start...

Your idea that women don't continue to mourn is certainly not true in MY case anyway.

I think people try to recapture a time in their past that was happy... whether it was 30 years ago or even just 5.

I believe one of the reasons you see so many baby boomers 'going back' is because today it's much easier to track people down... to find that special someone.

The thing that many don't seem to realize is that person you loved when you were 18 (15?) is not the same person you remember. And I'm not talking about what they look like. Everything they have been through since that time has impacted and changed them... just as your life has changed you. You may still have some common interests, but what you really are in love with is a memory.

Sure you can start a relationship again... and it may go well, or not... but it's like getting to know a new person for the most part. You have a few shared memories, but that isn't much compared to where you are now. And don't forget that love is blind. (grin) In your childish enthusiasm, you may not have 'noticed' a few things about that person that will really irritate you now. LOL

I think there IS something to the 'mid-life crisis' idea... we begin to realize our time remaining is limited and we wonder: "What did I miss?" "What do I wish I had done differently?"

I love a lot of the songs you mentioned, and I'll throw out one more for your consideration: "The First Cut is the Deepest"... that may also explain the imprint it made on us. It was the first time... for instance, remember your first car? First job? They make an impact simply because they were the first ones.

Oh, and "Young Love"? Sonny James. :-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), August 18, 2004.

(sigh...)

I still remember the first girl to ever tighten my bolts, I'll tellya! But she broke my heart. I can't remember if it was my first heart, or the second one, but it was a darned good one untill she ripped it out and gnawed it like a junk yard dog with a stale bisquit. But, she was a warewolf, afterall, so I shoulda guessed something was up when she suggested a walk on the beach in the light of the full moon. The bib was a clue, duh!

But, I've never been guilty of true young love like Gayla says. Absolutely everybody I've ever known has managed to irritate the crap outta me. I think it's just all those pitchforks and torches, ya know. "And when a lovely flame dies,.. smoke get's in your eyes" Especially if you stand to close to the stake where she's tied.

Anyway, I'm in the market for a new fling. I tried Yahoo, but there's hardly any women living along the bayou who want to be a love slave for someone 7'4" tall and a clumsy dancer. Besides, most of 'em have already caught me lurking around outside their windows already, and some of them can really shoot good!

So, I guess I'll just abandon hopes for a journey down Happiness Highway. I'll stroll Lonely Lane by myself once again, stopping only to smell the wilted flowers in the graveyard, run my fingers through somebody's freshly filled dirt, and dream of tall, squarely constructed women.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, and it would be a perfect match. But she's made it plain over and over. And I DON'T NEED to be held in the firm immensity of Helen's bosom!

-- Lon Frankenstien (evil@the.bayou), August 18, 2004.

Thanks Gayla. I've been struggling to come up with an decent answer for this one and you have covered most of what I wanted to say.

I think if you look back to an early relationship you are only remembering the great chemistry. Reality is different.

There are too many variables in the equation. Every relationship is different. Also I don't really believe there is one true love for each person.

Now Mr Frankenstein, you're surely not going to give up that easily are you? There's bound to be a big solid girl with an adjustable wrench out there somewhere. Just put a padlock on your heart until you're sure you've found the right one.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), August 18, 2004.

Gayla, and Carol, you bring up good points. As for Frankie,what you say also shows a lotta part, er, I mean heart. Hearts. But I'm not talking about remembering here. Sure, you may remember the first whatever, but it may not be the first that stuck to you with that everlasting adhesive. I used to argue with a friend of mine that there really was just one girl in the world for each of us. He pointed out that if that were the case, it was strange that she just happened to be from the same town or go to the same college or the like. Point taken (many of my friends are skeptics if not cynics-- hope it's not my fault), but for my purposes, I think I'll stick to my guns. Our early affections, when deep and true, are indelible. Of course, when they don't involve personal committment, they're just memories, perhaps of good times, but nothing to be mourned, only fondly remembered.

Now we come to the hard part which Gayla touches upon, that the people we knew decades ago have changed along the way even as have we. I don't think the feelings (what you talked about as chemistry maybe?) change. It's like (as I contend) rebellion in a kid arrests the maturing of his emotional relationships with his folks. Same kid, same folks, same feelings but maturation is interrupted. One can wind up with an identical relationship with his 23-year-old kid that he had when the kid was 15. It's unfortunate. If you want to progress, you gotta proceed from where you are (note, you cannot go back, it's only the same place, not the same time). (Like "Jumanji" maybe, it's still the same guy's turn!)Otherwise there are big gaps (can we spell dysfunction?). Maybe our affections are like that, too. We carry forward notes that our lives were out-of-balance by this or that unreconciled feeling yr-to-yr as a footnote on the bottom of the ledger sheet so that we can balance.

Complications aren't just emotional. Circumstances enter the picture. There are, indeed, too many variables in the equation, as Carol put it. Not only don't you know how the other person felt, for instance, but now they're moved out-of-state, married (maybe more than once!). They're older, they've got kids. You've married, you've got kids, careers in areas neither party would have forseen, different hobbies developed in the interim. But, as I said, your feelings are a done deal. I do not believe (except in the case of a genuine old-time salvation experience with Jesus) that we can really say "hey, I'm a different person." And even with such a genuine change of character, the personality that makes us who we are remains.

I liked the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away" (and I think it was two words, I'll have to think on that). That strange circumstances and the events of life intervened did not really reach the spot where their affection lived. But they achieved closure. The last footnote would be that the old debt was written off or the amount of the uncashed check added back. Pot's right! The gal made her (proper) choice, Hanks' character wasn't prevented any longer from moving on, we're led to hope with the gal with the wings on her tailgate (I mean the logo thing on her truck, wipe that grin off your face, Lon).

I would rate technological advances that make it easier to find people these days with facilitation, not causation.

The faults that might have evidenced upon closer inspection, etc may be what separates infatuation from the real thing. The real thing can live with them or hope forever that they're corrected. Maybe what I'm getting at is that when things come together right the first time, there's at least opportunity for input. When they don't, somethings broken. We can glue it back together, but it never looks right.

Carol's right, one needs only to note that every relationship is different to understand how all these things can be satisfactorily reconciled. That one feeling was deep-as-a-well and exclusive may only be squared with the reality that another is what we have for the rest of our lives by noting that they're different. Reality trumps chemistry, but only if the reality is chemistry too, it's just different chemistry. Otherwise it's pretend.

I believe that those who would weigh in on the "it don't matter anymore" side are girls. I believe men and women (with some exceptions) react differently to such loss, as explained earlier.

Sonny James. Right. Thanks. Why couldn't I remember that?

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), August 20, 2004.