Your Life in Great Details: Your First Love

I am fortunate enough to be able to say that the relationship I currently maintain with my first love is a friendship I am so happy to still have. If you have been reading my blog all summer, you have already met him so I don't need to go into great detail about what kind of a person he is. It's SGT D. I met him while he was a 19 year old newly promoted Specialist on his first tour to Iraq and I was a senior in college. I was participating in a wonderful program called Adopt A Platoon that allowed me to show my support for our military in a more explicit way than just slapping a magnet onto my car. I was sending monthly care packages and weekly letters to a soldier, who happened to be SGT D's best friend. To this day I'll never know how D actually got my email address and contact info from his buddy, but we started talking and over the course of his deployment became great friends. Our friendship resumed when he returned to the states, but it wasn't until he got news that he was going to deploy again (just a mere seven months after returning from his last 14 month tour) did I finally fly down to meet him face to face. We met, we had a great time, I left. Only when I returned to NY did both our mutual feelings for each other come back so back to Georgia I went to spend one last glorious weekend with him before he deployed for 15 more months.

There are a multitude of reasons why our relationship did not work out in the long term. Among the largest reason was the fact that we were very different people at very different places in our lives. We had an awesome friendship, but as a boyfriend I wanted him to be someone he was not. We were both young and very immature as far as our experiences with relationships went. We ended up breaking up just four months after he returned to the states. It was an ugly breakup. He was my first love and consequently my first heartbreak and neither of us handled it well. It was awful and I was in a lot of pain for a very long time. Fortunately, the old saying that time heals all wounds was true. Looking back now, we can both admit that we made mistakes. We both realize rushing into a relationship like we did three days before he deployed probably wasn't the greatest idea in the first place. We were great friends, but not the most compatible couple. We fought over everything from his tattoos to how he spent his money to what time he should call me every night. We both are who we are today because of our failed relationship though. I learned so much about myself in my relationship with him and he recently paid me one of the highest compliments he possibly could by telling me a lot of who he is today is because of me. There is still a great amount of love for him in my heart, but it is a different kind of love. He is a wonderful person, but he was just never *my* person. I am proud to call him my friend and proud that, no matter how many mistakes I made, there is no regret when I look back at our relationship. After all, how could you ever regret a moment like this?