By Lucy Cavendish
Of course, I remember my first love. I shall call him Eddie. We met on New Year's Eve at a fancy dress party in a pub in my local town. He was dressed as a vicar. I had, for some reason, gone as a vampire. I was 17 and he was 18, about to go off to university to study law.
I liked him because he talked to me and seemed interesting and funny. I gave him my telephone number and then waited, my heart pounding, for him to ring, which he did the next day.
We arranged to meet and that was it. I had been out with boys before. I had a boyfriend called Paul when I was 15, but I hadn't fallen in love with him. I went out with him only because he had a car.
But Eddie, he was different. He was intelligent, witty, erudite. He wore second-hand clothes and listened to the Smiths. We were from very similar backgrounds and we liked the same things. We danced to Lloyd Cole And The Commotions together and tried smoking.
In fact, we did all sorts of things together. We hitched round the UK. We went camping in France. We took a cable car up Mont Blanc. I dyed his hair bleach-blond. He dyed mine pillarbox red. I look back at photographs of us now. We were always laughing, kissing, holding hands.
But more than that, we discovered deep emotions. I fell in love with him. It made me feel giddy and desperate all at the same time. It was as if I had to learn a whole new lexicon for my life.
He made my heart lurch. He could make me smile and cry within one sentence and I would find myself staring at him for hours on end, marvelling at how this beautiful young man loved me.
And we discovered sex. Not just fumbling, embarrassed sex in the back of a car down the industrial estate, but real, proper sex where we spent time and energy with each other, both naive but willing and trusting.
When his parents moved to Africa, Eddie and I went out there for my 21st birthday. By then, we'd been together for years and everyone thought we'd marry, but we broke up within a year. Somehow, by the time I was 22, we had both changed.
Eddie had become Edward and gone off to be a lawyer in London. I was going through my student years and was flirting with joining the Socialist Workers' Party. We seemed, politically and geographically, miles apart.
Still, it was traumatic when we broke up. I had kept all his letters (this was pre-email) and I would read them and cry.
Eddie was an intrinsic part of my late adolescence and early 20s. We had the best fun anyone could possibly have.
Like most teenage couples, however, we decided we were too young to carry on. Were there not other people out there we might love? I think this is how we both felt, even if it was with a sense of regret.
Yet, in truth, no one forgets their first love. How could they? It's just not possible to forget that tingling sensation you feel when you fall in love for the very first time.
Your first love brings up emotions that you may never have felt before - wild and passionate and almost startling in their intensity, almost a pure version of strong emotions that, later on in life, experience teaches you to dilute.
I will never forget how I felt with Eddie. Sometimes, I believe I will never feel that way again. In fact, most people feel they have never come near feeling that strongly ever again.
A recent publication from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex suggests that first relationships become so idealised, they set up unrealistic benchmarks for subsequent relationships.
According to Dr Malcolm Brynin, the principal research officer, it is safest to avoid an unrealistic version of a first relationship. This, he claims, leads to a lifetime of disappointment.
This certainly seems to be true given the amount of time people spend trying to track down past loves either through Friends Reunited, MySpace or Facebook.
There are endless stories of couples who spilt up eons ago tracking each other down and getting back together 20 to 30 years after they first met.
This is precisely what happened to my friend Jane. She had been married to her husband for over 20 years when, two years ago, he announced he was leaving her. She was devastated at the time. But within six months, she was looking up old boyfriends on social networking sites.
I asked her why she was doing it. She told me it was because it felt safe to her.
"Part of it is because I feel these people are known to me,'" she said. "I feel too vulnerable to make contact with a total stranger." But part of it was also because she wondered if there was one-who-got-away.
"Maybe back there is my soulmate," she said. "It's just that we couldn't see it at the time."
Earlier on this year, she made contact with her First Love. She had originally met him in France. His marriage had also broken up. They met. They fell in love again.
He has, six months down the line, now moved in with her and they seem idyllically happy. I asked her the other day why she and Eric had split up in the first place.
"I think we were too young," she said. "We thought there were more fish in the sea. Now we know there aren't."
But does having romantic feelings about your first love have a massive effect on expectations in future relationships?
How can a second love ever match up to the first?
When we fall in love for the first time, we are young. Returning to that love makes us feel young again.
Jane seems to have recreated some of this youthful hope with Eric. Their children are teenagers, Consequently, they are able to go on dates with each other, just as they did all those years ago.
They go out to dinner, just the two of them. They flew back to Paris to revisit their old haunts. It is very romantic.
First loves are our testing ground of how to, or how not to, behave in a relationship. Ones which are often mired in the apprehension of disappointment.
All girls I know are convinced their boyfriends are about to "finish" with them. It is terrifying when you first fall in love because there is, inevitably, an end to it where you will both end up feeling hurt.
It is the putting of yourself on the line for the very first time that makes first love so thrilling, so important, so necessary. I could not have gone on to love other men properly without having loved Eddie. He was a wonderful first proper boyfriend to have.
But should I have stayed with him? No. Of course not.
He was the lovely first boyfriend who gave me a lot of confidence in myself and, for that, I am supremely grateful.
I have gone on to meet and fall in love with many other wonderful men and have, eventually, met my fifth or sixth love who I have remained with for nearly a decade.
Yet, some years ago, I tried to contact Eddie. I had wound up living near where we grew up, a single woman with a child - disappointed and unhappy. I kept driving past the house where Eddie's parents had lived and it took me back with a jolt to a time when I felt truly happy (a less complicated time, I hasten to add).
I started dwelling on an idea that Eddie and I should have stayed together. So what if he was a bit conservative. I could deal with that, couldn't I? I also got it into my head that, wherever Eddie was, he, too, was missing me. He, too, had never got over me - although, in truth, I was over him and clutching at straws.
Then I bumped into a friend of his. "You should call him!" this friend said gleefully. "He'd love to hear from you."
So I picked up the phone and rang Eddie's office. I left what I hoped was a light-hearted message. "Let's have lunch or a coffee. What have you been up to?" - that kind of thing.
Over the next few days, as I sat obsessively next to the telephone just as my 20-year-old self did, I wound myself up into a near frenzy.
I had visions of Eddie and I living in a house in the countryside. I imagined my family's surprise when Eddie walked back through the door. I dreamed up a wedding.
But it was not to be. Eddie never called me back. He probably knew something that I also, deep down inside, knew.
First loves are wonderful. They are perfect just as they are. In the past. - Daily Mail