Eight.

Enter part one of two, my simple thoughts on how love first entered my life and left its mark, indelibly so.

In 2014, I experienced my very first breakup. I had spent two years with Alberto, who as my wonderful introductory boyfriend set the standard for how a good partner ought to be. He proved to me that I could be loved in ways that I only ever saw depicted in media—that that kind of love could be real—and he changed me, irrevocably, by doing so.

All these years later, I’ve never once wavered in my assessment of him: he was a flawless boyfriend. Similarly, in our every retrospective conversation since then, he’s never once accepted that mantle in totality. It’s a heavy burden to bear, being the individual who sets the pace as someone’s first love, and he still teases me for idealizing him. On this subject, he and I will have to continue to disagree.

I maintain that I don’t overrate the truth. I’m not delusional—I’m well aware that he wasn’t perfect—and I’ve never been one to ignore anybody’s flaws. However, it’s my ardent refusal to view anyone through rose-colored glasses that most colors my perception of him: I see him for who he honestly was, not who I wanted him to be.

Alberto was smart. He was studious, yes, and I witnessed firsthand his academic diligence (as a scholarship recipient with excellent grades), but I say he was smart because he wasn’t naive. Unfailingly kind, he always chose to see the best in a person. He saw people not just for who they were but also who they could be. In me, he saw my potential and always encouraged me to reach it.

That, too, was a deliberate choice.

Throughout childhood, here and there, I would come across interviews in various media with (elderly) couples who had stood the test of time. Their relationships spanned decades, if not lifetimes, and they were often asked the million dollar question—how? Their answers always shared a common thread, one that has stuck with me all this time: choice. Love was always, is always, a choice, and they chose to stay in love.

Alberto chose me. For all of my insecurities, for all of my issues, he chose to be with me. He chose to be my partner. When we had disagreements, he chose to reconcile with me.

With him, I gradually came out of my shell. As much as college is known to be a time for personal growth due to intellectual freedom, my coming of age was also very much catalyzed by having him in my life. The way he loved me empowered me to go after my personal and professional goals because I suddenly had the steadiest rock affixed to the end of my proverbial kite. I no longer cared about the opinions of others. Casually, without fanfare, I came out to all of my friends as if it were a nonissue, and I wasn’t troubled by the resultant loss of friends as a common consequence of coming out. (Those people weren’t genuine friends, anyways.) All that mattered to me was that I had the kindest, most loving boyfriend in the world, and I wouldn’t jeopardize that for anything…or anyone.

During my time with Alberto, I met someone else.

At one of my jobs, I became acquainted with a new hire who was a year below me at our university. I could tell that I was attracted to them, and it was a new, uncomfortable situation; I’d never before been attracted to anyone while being in a committed relationship with someone else, obviously, and all I had to guide me were blanket moral tenets imposed upon me by society (looking at others is cheating and talking to others is cheating and cheating is bad because it’s hurtful and wrong and also there’s the concept of emotional cheating and…). I tried to avoid that person, but I also knew I was lying to myself—I wanted to interact with them, I wanted to get to know them, and within a couple of weeks I knew that I had a crush on them.

I was miserable. I felt guilty for my attraction and I wanted to divest myself of it. I had the perfect partner, and I couldn’t understand why I felt this way about someone else. I wanted to purge the attraction and myself with it for the moral sin I was committing. I needed it to go away, and in the end I could only come up with one solution.

I sent a long text message to that person. I confessed that I was attracted to them, that it was probably very obvious to them, that I knew it wasn’t reciprocated, that I wanted them to reject my affections because there was no other way to bring them to an expedient end, and that I was very, very sorry for putting them in such an awkward position. I begged them to do me this one favor out of kindness because I desperately wanted the emotions to move on. Kindly, gently, and to my great gratitude, they did. To this day, that instance of my crush being shattered into oblivion is also the only instance in which I’ve ever felt as much relief as I did relative sadness.

(Ironically, after I’d engineered my own rejection, there was an entire other spectacle of that person’s Algerian French ex-fiance coming on to me, and again I wondered how I’d ended up entangled within yet another emotional mess.)

I didn’t care that I had severed a possible connection between someone else and me. I wanted to choose the partner I already had because he’d chosen me, because he was mine, because love is real when it’s reciprocated and not merely chemical. I’ve always believed that chemistry can fade, but, thanks to all the couples that loved before I did, I understood love to be an exercise in consistency, a choice made more real and reified through continuous iterations day by day by day.

Armchair psychologists would explain my motivations as having been informed by a lack of stability throughout my childhood—my biological parents divorced when I was young and I was never able to rely upon them for any semblance of emotional support—and perhaps they would be correct. Perhaps I choose stability because I never had it, but it is ultimately also my decision to make; I’m an adult, and I’m a being aware of my own cognition. When push came to shove, I chose commitment.

Alberto represented that to me. He represented—and continues to represent—the possibility made real that someone would choose me above everyone else when in my lifetime I’d never before been anyone’s number one, and I knew that I would never let myself take that for granted because I felt, to the deepest core of my psyche, of my being, how truly momentous it was to want somebody and to be wanted in return. It wasn’t just that I was his first choice—it was also that he was mine, flaws and all.

Our eventual breakup was an uneasy decision, but it was also the right one.

Alberto’s graduation preceded mine by a year, and he was off to pursue a master’s degree in another state. We’d both known that this was coming, and I think we were on the same page. He was about to embark on the next great chapter of his life, and what right did I have to keep him bound to me, hundreds of miles away? I didn’t want to be in a long-distance relationship, and I wanted him to feel free to make decisions independent of me. Selfishly, I also knew that I needed to experience going through life on my own. I needed to keep meeting people and I needed to date others, because I needed to know without a doubt whether he really would be the one for me. Without experience, I knew that I would always question whether I’d made the right choice.

No separation is truly easy, and our last days together were complex and abrasive. I avoided him. I didn’t speak to him. It was a novel sort of hurt that I was experiencing, and I withdrew. I didn’t see him during the entire week of his graduation, and then he was gone, and I was alone.

Over the next month, I took on a couple of jobs to keep me busy during my first proper summer in New York without him. I had my internship in the music industry because I was working on building my career, I continued my part-time job at the university to bring in a little bit of income, and I devoted some hours each week to staffing one of the university’s residence halls. In the lattermost’s resource center for residents, I sat in the corner and cried.

He’d left me a voicemail. I listened to it over and over just to hear the familiarity of his voice, but the words never really stuck. I think he was apologetic about not seeing me before he left New York, even though it was entirely my fault because I had withdrawn into myself.

Finally, I called him back. At that point, I’d already deleted his contact information and all of our text messages—and I may have even deleted him across all my social media—because I didn’t know how to behave in a breakup. I wanted to prevent myself from being unable to move on; I didn’t want to yearn for what no longer was, and if I could no longer see what we had then perhaps I wouldn’t hurt for so long. I no longer had his phone number except from the voicemail he’d left. I called him, and he picked up.

During that final phone call, I think I apologized. I was sorry for being sullen and withdrawn. He had been so wonderful to me throughout our time together, and I had repaid him with total silence. But, truthfully, I was thankful for him. I was thankful that he’d come into my life and shown me that possibilities could be made real, and that he’d changed me from an eternal pessimist to a pessimist-optimist hybrid. (I still lean pessimist, though, because I’m afraid of disappointment.) I hoped that he’d had as good of an experience dating me as I had dating him. He said he’d always love me, no matter what, and I believed him. I still do.

Who would I be, today, if my first boyfriend had been someone else, someone less kind? What kind of loves would I have experienced, if at all, and what kind of lover would I be? It’s all speculation, I know, but I think it’s because of Alberto that I’m drawn almost exclusively to kindness. Of all the men I’ve ever dated, none of them have been, at their core, unkind. It’s the character trait I’ve come to prize most above all else.

Alberto’s right to allege that I romanticize him to some degree; I do, but not in the way that he assumes. I’ve made the deliberate choice to look back at our shared history as the perfect first love, with him as the perfect first boyfriend, because—and especially given my love life since—I want to be loved like he loved me. My relationship with him has become my North Star, the guiding light and standard against which I’ve come to measure my relationship with anyone else, because it’s someone like him with whom I want to be, because it’s him like whom I strive to be. I want to be loved in this way because I myself have come to love in this way. The hope, therefore, is that I’ll find it.