Synopsis
Have you ever wondered what happened to your first love? Imagine bumping into her twelve years after you last saw her and realising you still fancy her rotten. This is what happens to Dig Ryan when he sees Delilah again.
Now imagine you're Nadine. You've been Dig's best friend for the last fifteen years, and you've just realised that you're in love with him. Delilah was your nemesis at school and it turns out she stills is. When she resurfaces, you might find yourself feeling extremely jealous and start doing really childish things. Like phoning your first love, Phil, just to get your own back....
This is a story about ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends and what happens when you start messing with the past. And how sometimes what you're looking for isn't in the past or in the future, but right under your nose.
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Lisa Jewell cautions us all to remember that what makes a fantastic boyfriend doesn't necessarily make for a good friend ...
When I first started going out with my husband, back in 1995, there was one aspect of our relationship which I found unsettling - his platonic friendships with his ex-girlfriends. It wasn't that I was jealous, but just that I found it impossible to imagine sitting in a pub chatting with someone you used to have sex with, whose tongues and fingers had been in all manner of intimate places, without being painfully conscious of the fact. Surely you'd just sit there all night thinking about what they looked like naked? And what if you'd been in love? How could you ever divorce yourself from the strength of those feelings, how could they ever translate themselves into something as everyday as friendship?
My first experience of love was a wonderful, beautiful thing and despite the fact that it ended quite messily, my memories of Sam were warm and filled with an appreciation of my good fortune in having known him at such a hugely formative time in my life. Inspired my new boyfriend's successful platonic friendships, it occurred to me that a friendship with Sam might bring a new dimension to my life and so I phoned him, out of the blue, seven years after we'd last seen each other. He sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me and we arranged to go out for a drink the following week.
When I saw him standing at the bar I was relieved. He hadn't changed at all, he was still the sweet-faced, handsome, nicely dressed, well-built bloke I remembered. But there was something wrong with the dynamic, with the way he related to me. He still had the same friends as when we were together and he still lived at home. He didn't have a girlfriend. He was more interested in having unrequited crushes on the teenage girls who worked at his office. But the most unsettling thing about the evening was how little interest he had in me, or in what I'd been doing for the last seven years. I told him that I'd been married - his eyes glazed over. I told him I had a boyfriend - there was no reaction at all. I told him I was happy - he looked almost disdainful. It was as if he couldn't admit to himself that I'd moved on over the years, when he was still in the same place, emotionally and physically as the last time I'd seen him.
He called the next day, told me he'd enjoyed himself and would like to do it again some time. But I didn't want to. He'd been a fantastic boyfriend but I knew that he wouldn't make a good friend. It made me feel incredibly sad. I wanted him to have been happier, to have lived up to his teenage potential. I wanted him to have developed enough to have been capable of friendship, but it wasn't going to happen.
I've been talking to friends recently about their first loves. A rare few have stayed friends right from the beginning but most didn't. And no-one I've spoken to has managed to salvage a friendship from a reunion with a love that hadn't been given the opportunity to grow organically through the years. When Dig, the male protagonist of my novel 'Thirtynothing' bumps into his first love, Delilah, he still feels the same physical attraction but he has to do a lot of learning before he realises that there's no future for them. She's changed completely in the intervening twelve years and whatever ties bound them together in their teens have long ceased to exist. It's Nadine, another ex-girlfriend who he stayed friends with afterwards, who's the right girl for him, because they've evolved together.
I've read stories before of ex-lovers who met up later in life and fell in love all over again, but I failed to unearth anything as heart-warming. At best, friends described their meetings as pleasant but unexceptional, at worst as hideously, belly-rottingly embarrassing.
They talked of the shocking physical reminders of the passage of time; the sagging, the wrinkling, the greying. Or the awful 'what was I thinking?' realisation that their fondly remembered lost love was really ugly. Or the awkwardness of those 'so - what have you been up to?' conversations. Do you really want to know that he's a dot.com millionaire and has married a supermodel? But mainly they talked of the sad, pathetic embarrassment of standing in the street and talking to someone who used to be the most important person in their life and finding that there was nothing left whatsoever.
If you are destined to remain friends with a love, then you'll instinctively make the effort to stay in touch. But some relationships are no more than a chemical collison and sometimes it's better just to leave on those rose-coloured spectacles, pack away the joy and exhilaration of your first love in a little box marked 'My History.' And leave it there.
