Insight hears from people whose first loves left a mark. Watch Tuesday March 29 at 8:30pm on SBS TV or on On Demand .
Sharon was only 12 years old when she first laid eyes on her Year 7 classmate Daryl, but even then she knew something would happen between them.
“There was just a connection, I guess like a soulmate,” Sharon told Kumi Taguchi on Insight.
“I said to my aunt, ‘I’ve met the person that I’m going to marry’ … she just looked at me like, ‘Yeah, right. You’re 12'.”
But Sharon was right. She and Daryl started dating in Year 11 and have been married for 36 years.
“There’s been … tough times and good times, but we’ve always come back to each other,” Daryl said.
But for most of us, our first love isn’t the fairy tale we might have expected.
For Laura, romance novels and movies built up an unrealistic fantasy of what love would be like.
“The emotions and the feelings and the behaviours that were actually quite extreme were [portrayed as] normal, and what first love really felt like,” she said.
When she met her first love, she felt “weak at the knees … like I was gonna pass out.” But the love story didn’t play out the way she expected.
“I placed a lot of pressure on myself for it to work out, because it was this first love moment. I felt like I was only going to get one chance to make it this really special love story."
“And so no, it didn’t work out.”
Clinical psychologist, Dr Vivienne Lewis specialises in working with adolescents. She said teenagers “fall in love very easily.”
These overwhelming feelings can be very positive, but she cautions that young people can be “easily led into relationships that may not be so good for us.”
Sharon and Daryl pictured on their wedding day.
Before embarking on our first relationship, our ideas about romance and dating are shaped by our experiences with close family members and friends, according to relationship researcher associate professor Gery Karantzas.
“We take that knowledge into our first relationships, because we have nothing else to go by,” he told Insight.
Associate professor Karantzas said our first love might not last forever, but no matter what, it’s bound to be an important life experience.
From learning what attraction feels like, to initiating a relationship, making the relationship work and engaging in conflict, to potentially navigating a breakup, there are many gaps in our knowledge when we set out on our first romance.
For Sharon, it’s a lesson that continues to this day.
“We’re always learning, even after being together for so long.”
