It seems to me that when a lot of people talk about their first love their eyes go cloudy, and their words invoke this vision of a lost summer romance in a time they long to go back to. When I talk about my first love, I laugh, and will be the first to admit that I am glad we are no longer together.
Comic-Boy and I started dating the fall of our sophomore year of college. We met while working on a production of Pride and Prejudice together, however we barely spoke. I (a theatre performance major) was stage-managing the production while he (a theatre tech major) was cast as Mr. Darcy.
Now before you stop me, and say, “Alice, you promised no clichés,” let me tell you that a) I hate the story of Pride and Prejudice and b) I think that the character of Mr. Darcy is a creep and a jerk. So no, I was not attracted to him because of his opportunity to play this romantic lead.
We started dating about a month after the show closed, and we dated for a little over a year. Up until then, I hadn’t been in a relationship for longer than four months, so this is quite an accomplishment for me.
I loved him, I really did. However, (tiny cliché warning) hindsight truly is 20/20, and now I realized how much I sacrificed to be with him. His parents were divorced, and his dad who could help fund his college tuition thought a degree was unnecessary, and his mom, who wanted to help, couldn’t afford to. A couple of months after we started dating, Comic-Boy had to withdraw from school for a semester, which resulted him being essentially homeless.
Of course, like any love-blinded girlfriend, I let him sleep in my dorm room (much to the dismay of Arete who was my roommate at the time). We had pretty much moved in together, and I started paying for everything, including his food, movie tickets, etc. When his mom had trouble paying for his cell phone bill, my parents added his number on to our family plan. We paid for everything for him, short of co-signing a loan for tuition.
At the same time, Comic-Boy started becoming intensely co-dependent, antisocial, and depressed. He would guilt trip me if I tried to go out with my sorority sisters, and refused to get to know any of them. I started ditching out on activities with them so I could sit in a room with him and watch TV or play video games.
Summer was a bit of a break, after trying to live together in an apartment while he failed at finding a job, we both packed up and went home, giving me two months without him hanging on to me.
When school started again, he had found a loan, and had his own dorm room, but he still guilted me out of spending time with my own friends. Luckily, when sorority pledging rolled around, I had found a small group of other theatre kids that he actually enjoyed hanging out with, so I could immerse myself in pledging activities without him guilting me.
Suddenly, I was having a blast. My immersion in pledging became an avoidance of him, and I quickly realized that no matter how inconvenient it seemed to him, we needed to break up. I got a text from him one day saying that we needed to talk, and I gritted my teeth, preparing for him to go off on me for abandoning him for the past week or so.
Instead, he burst into tears and told me that he had drunkenly made out with one of the theatre girls I got him to befriend. He said he thought we should break up, and I agreed, and rushed him out of my room. I wasn’t pissed at the time, but that came later (and probably deserves it’s own post).
Looking back on my relationship with Comic-Boy, I don’t regret anything, except that maybe I didn’t end it sooner. He was the first guy I ever said “I love you” to, but I never want to go back to those “romantic youthful days”.
Good, riddance, I say!
-Alice Ambrosia
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