Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

Everyone remembers their first loves. Those we believed would be our soul mates when we were young, more often than not, are now a distant memory. The dramatic nature of these relationships can make the inevitable breakups seem like the end of the world, when in fact they are only the start to our exposure to love. Students reveal their agonizing-yet-hilarious memories of their first loves.

How did your first love come to be?

Mayar Alanis, an AUP student from Jordan and the Ivory Coast, had her first relationship with a young man slightly older than her named Mohammed. “I was actually just about to turn 16. It was a summer thing, but it got serious and intense very quickly. He was very old,” said Alanis laughing. “He was 23. He didn’t even know I was 16; he didn’t care, he didn’t ask.” One day we were in his car and he asked me when my birthday was, so I told him November 12th, and then he asked, ‘Oh so how old are you?’ So, I told him I was about to turn 16… He was like ‘What?! I thought you were 19.’” Alanis reminded him that he had never asked, but he responded, saying “Mentally you are fine, so I don’t care about your age.”

Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, a student at John Cabot University in Rome, was with a few friends hanging around downtown Chicago, and her future boyfriend John — who was quite intoxicated — was busy falling off of his skateboard. “We were being really indifferent towards each other, again, that sort of ‘I don’t really give a fuck’ attitude. It’s something that we used in those situations,” she explained. He then skateboarded away in a dramatic manner and Fitzpatrick’s friend Sierra told her that John had feelings for her. Up in a high-rise later in the night, she remembers: “I stepped outside on this balcony, it was pouring rain, and he stepped outside with me and we kissed. It was so much like a movie.”

Gabriel El Maallem, an AUP student from Paris, remembers his first love from when he was “really starting to feel [himself]” at age 14. He met an English girl in his school principal’s office and instantly wanted to know who she was. “I was in a school where we were supposed to learn French, and I didn’t really have anyone to speak English with. I really liked her vibe,” El Maallem says, and three weeks of flirtation passed before anything happened. “After October break, I got her to come over to my house and hook up. This was the first time I was hooking up with a girl,” he remembers. “I instantly had feelings for her, I ‘craquéd’ for her, like we say in French. We spent a lot of time together.”

How did your first relationship end?

Alanis’s boyfriend “was over protective and we had religious differences.” Alanis is a Sunni Muslim and her first boyfriend was a Shia Muslim. She remembers, “We were fighting all the time, I was leaving for school; it was just overall bad timing and I felt like I was much more open-minded than him.” For Alanis, the relationship “was really shitty, we didn’t get along on some stuff. I wasn’t fully comfortable, but I was attached at the same time.” Her first love was also quite judgmental towards her regarding her body and physical fitness. “He was kissing me and he put his hand on my stomach,” she recalls, “and he was like, ‘You know what, I am going to take you to the gym every day, and this is going to be better.’” There were several negative factors which contributed to the end of Alanis’s first relationship, but the disrespect and discomfort ultimately led to its conclusion.

Fitzpatrick, all laughs throughout her nostalgic storytelling, described the end of her first relationship: “What followed was probably the funniest, or least funny, joke in the world. We didn’t work out because I was fat and he was short. I was about a head taller than him. We kept things quiet for the first couple weeks, first month, for as long as we could, really.” Outside pressure and jokes regarding the physical appearance of the couple became too much, which caused them to split. On a lighter note, “We found a lot of solace in one another, even though we looked diametrically opposed, physically.”

El Maallem remembers his first heartbreak as the betrayal he faced from both his best friend and his first love: “My best friend was always making fun of me for being chubby and being with this girl made me feel really good about myself.” In contrast, his best friend was very physically fit. One day his friend approached him saying that he had signed up at the same gym as the girl and that they had hooked up before the gym one day. El Maallem was heartbroken and confused: “It became a thing where I couldn’t hook up with her because we were both hooking up with her.” El Maallem remembers it being competitive, and situations would spring up in class that were uncomfortable: “Me and my best friend both sat next to her and we both put our hands on her lap.” Wondering what he would say to her today, El Maallem says, “I would just want to let her know that I was too clingy, and I clearly wasn’t her first love, although she was mine.”

BY MARIELLE “GOOSE” DALVET

ILLUSTRATION BY KATERINA MCGRATH