“Alison, Rachel, Nicole, Elizabeth…”
First love and first loss

Turkey-Pond_Andrew Wyeth

Remember how exciting it was, when you were a kid, to like someone – like like them, that is – and find out that they liked you back? Steph and I have been talking a lot about podcasts ever since doing our last one, and one of the topics we both wanted to address was love. In this episode, I interview someone very close to me about it – my husband, Tim. Tim can remember the names all the girls he had crushes on, going grade by grade, from 1st to 12th. I wanted to know more about his memories of first crushes, and first love. When does infatuation turn in to love? What does love feel like? How does it change as you get older?

In talking about these topics over a series of conversations, though, we found ourselves drifting in to discussion about Tim’s mom, Jamien. Jamien, with whom Tim had a difficult relationship, died of breast cancer when he was 17 and she was 48. About a year after she died, Tim fell in love for the first time. Three years later, as he coped with the break up of this first real relationship, Tim realized that feelings he’d suppressed about his mom’s death were coming back to him powerfully. “It felt like going through mom’s death again, only way worse this time.”

Click below to listen to the discussion. (You may notice that the audio quality changes slightly at times; this is because the podcast was recorded over several conversations).

Image: Turkey Pond, by Andrew Wyeth (1944)

2 Comments

  1. Mary Bralove

    Tim is a brave man. Most men wouldn’t talk on this topic at all. So it is interesting to hear a male voice.

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