Dear ones, almost all of us have that one childhood sweetheart, the first great love. Sometimes you wonder years later what you liked about that person, but sometimes the fascination for that person remains for a very long time. Like with Marcel. He is married with two children and met his first great love again 1.5 years ago and secretly fell in love again. Since then, his heart has been on a rollercoaster…
I’ve fallen in love with my childhood sweetheart again
Almost 18 months ago, in my early 40s, I turned up at a school reunion for the first time since leaving school. I had actually finished with my school days and also with the people from that time. But age, personal maturity and the passage of time mean that I no longer see things as narrowly and doggedly as I did 20 years ago – so I went to the reunion.
I realised that I was one of the few who had kept myself (and my weight) surprisingly well. This may sound arrogant, but some of my old classmates had aged significantly worse than me.
Nina, however, was an exception. We used to be a couple, when we were still teenagers. We hadn’t seen each other for 22 years and I didn’t know much about her either, except that she also had a family and was still supposed to live in my hometown.
I wasn’t nervous at all or had even the slightest thought that our meeting could be exciting in any way. We only spoke briefly that evening, but not superficially. And, of course, I had noticed how pretty she was.
A few weeks later, someone started a chat group in our school class and I had her number. Every now and then there were signs of life from each other and one evening – I had one too many glasses of wine – I wrote to her personally. We wrote back and forth and I told her that things were difficult at home.
For some reason, I felt a familiarity with her – as if the last few years had never gone away and it was still 1996. I remembered the feeling I had when I was lying next to her in the tent, one night before the start of European Championship 96 in England.
We wrote back and forth a lot over the next few weeks. We had the same sense of humour and I noticed how attentive she was. She didn’t seem to forget anything and she often asked me about my relationship. That didn’t bother me, on the contrary. I enjoyed the input from a woman and the interest in me as a person. We continued to write to each other, sometimes several times a day, sometimes not at all for days.
Then the next class reunion came up. Nina agreed. I realised that it was important for me to look good that evening. I was on time, one of the first. She was already there.
When we hugged, it happened. She hugged me a little tighter than I had expected. And something happened inside me at that moment. I realised something that hadn’t even occurred to me before – or that I wanted to ignore: there was something there. I was falling in love with this woman. Or: I already was. The evening remained quiet, we talked to each other, but nothing more.
Back at home, I had to think. Despite (or perhaps because of) my long relationship, I had fallen in love with someone else before. But it was a long-distance crush and I quickly avoided all contact in order to nip it in the bud. That worked well too, so I decided to do the same with Nina.I withdrew
I withdrew, I stopped writing to her, but she kept checking in regularly (not every day) to see how I was doing. And I have to admit that the first thing I did when I got up in the morning was look at my mobile phone and hope for a message from her. We both know by now that our marriages aren’t particularly happy.
A few weeks before Christmas, we met up again in a small group. This time, I had more in mind. What exactly? I don’t know (and didn’t know) myself. Either way, nothing came of it – we barely got a word in edgewise that evening. But I did catch myself staring at her several times. She later wrote to me that I was unfortunately sitting too far away from her. I agreed with her.Christmas was a lonely time for me. My wife and children travelled to my in-laws on the first holiday until after the New Year. During this time, I realised how unhappy I was. I wanted more with Nina, she seemed to understand me blindly, I didn’t have to fool her. I also felt guilty because I was supposed to have these feelings for someone else – and not for a wife and mother (who wasn’t married to me).
I decided to tell Nina everything – in our case: to write. I secretly hoped that she would make a decision and cut off contact with me immediately. She took her time to reply and made it clear to me, firmly but kindly, that she didn’t feel the same. At the same time, she wasn’t prepared to give up everything. Our friendship or whatever it was.
So we stuck to our chats, getting ambiguous or flirty every now and then. We joked that we might bump into each other at a certain place where we used to meet as children: an old hut in the middle of the forest…
We saw each other three more times after that: the first time we were even alone in a room for about 20 minutes. But nothing happened. I could hardly look at her, we were both unsure. At least that’s how I felt. Nevertheless, I liked the intense feeling that spread through me afterwards. She knows that, I didn’t have to write it to her – I did it anyway, of course.
I’ve never felt anything like it
A few weeks later, at the next meeting, we were again in a larger group. I had to work up a bit of courage, but at some point there was the first accidental touch on her arm. A short time later, her shoulder. It began a harmonious give and take of brief but intense moments in which (for me) it wasn’t just our skin that touched. I had never experienced anything like it before.
Sometime around four in the morning, we were sitting close – but not too close – to each other. Nina was stroking her hair and it kept touching my arm, which was lying behind her on the back of a bench. The next day, I was sure for the first time that there must be more to Nina. Given what she knew about me and my feelings for her, she couldn’t have played with my feelings like that and allowed so much.
But over the next few days, she just kept quiet about it. I wrote to her and tried to get something out of her – but I didn’t succeed. Nothing had happened, she wrote at some point when I asked specifically what was going on between us. A few more weeks passed before we saw each other for the last time. The atmosphere in our chats was strange – characterised by my disappointment and her light-heartedness.
So before we met for the last time in a very small circle one afternoon in April at her best friend’s house, I was more than just upset. The atmosphere was strange, Nina seemed pretty tense during the two hours we saw each other.
When we said goodbye, she gave me a quick hug. It happened so quickly for me that I couldn’t even look her in the eye – those dark, big, beautiful eyes that can see right through me at any time, whether we’re sitting together or in front of our smartphones.
The next few months were a rollercoaster ride of emotions for me – we still wrote to each other, but she hardly ever revealed anything about herself and often didn’t get back to me or only very late. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t switch off my feelings. I tried a few times to organise a dinner with several old friends – as an excuse to see each other again, of course. But Nina didn’t have time.
I went out for dinner anyway and after a meeting with old friends, I got so drunk out of frustration that I couldn’t walk anymore… Something like that had never happened to me before and I decided to break away from her and focus on my family again.
As a consequence, I withdrew from the WhatsApp group of our school class by simply unsubscribing from the service completely. Then Nina suddenly sent me a text message with a rather defiant undertone, to which I responded in a similarly defiant manner. I’m not sure whether she was actually concerned about me or about our friendship – or about the fact that someone might get suspicious. She wouldn’t admit to one or the other – she’s too proud for that.
I kept thinking about deleting her number – or better still, all the numbers that connected us. But of course I couldn’t do it. And apparently neither did she, because every now and then she would ask how I was doing.
I never responded – because I didn’t want her to know that I think about her all the time, that she’s my first thought in the morning and my last in the evening. That I’ve been regularly questioning my marriage for about a year because I’m longing for another woman. For a woman who is so rooted in my childhood and youth that I sometimes imagine what might have been in those two decades if I hadn’t withdrawn from this „old“ life after school.
These are strange and also somehow tormenting thoughts, because they should not (and cannot) in any way relativise what I have now – a marriage and great children, of whom I am quite proud. But it also feels good to live a bit in the past – it’s the only thing that still seems to connect me to Nina.
One evening a few weeks ago, in early October, I had another weak moment – I wrote to her again, quite extensively about my feelings for her. I typed the message into my smartphone late into the night. What did I expect from it? I don’t know… Somehow I want her in my life, but not just as a secret text message contact. But what exactly do I want? Definitely not to destroy my family – and actually not Nina’s either.
What am I to her?
But I want to be important to Nina, I want to be close to her. Physically, too. Of course, I suspect that she’s not ready for that – and secretly, a small part of me wants her to be so annoyed by me and my confessions of love that she breaks off contact with me for good. Her reaction was indeed annoyed. She was clear and precise in her response, seemed almost angry – and made it clear to me that there was nothing there and that she had never promised me anything and that we had just had some fun. Nothing more.
I read her message several times – and each time I read it, I realised what I hadn’t wanted to see in the last 1.5 years: I was a toy, a means to an end. So that she could feel good and desired.
It’s hard to describe how much this affected and hurt me. But it opened my eyes. I didn’t write her back – what can you write at a time like that? Never the truth… Over the next three weeks, I managed to think about her very little. I felt more balanced, calmer and happier again.
Nina didn’t contact me again either and I fully expected it to stay that way. I wasn’t planning to contact her again either. I’m strong, I’ll really get through this this time, that was my mantra this time. But at a moment when I was feeling totally calm inside, my mobile phone beeped. It was a retro beep, like the ones you hear on old Nokia mobile phones from the late 90s. The sound is only associated with one very specific person. Nina wrote to me saying that she had been waiting for a reply from me for weeks, even though she didn’t want to have this feeling of waiting.
I know that she must have just had too much wine, otherwise she couldn’t have been so honest. I replied late, very reserved and monosyllabic. Her reply a few seconds later made me feel hot and cold: „Tuesday at 10 o’clock at our hut…?“
