January 26th 2010

Firsts Are Forever

Remember your first kiss? Of course you do. The first time you went "all the way"? Mais oui. You could probably even supply the color of the lampshade next to the bed.

Chances are, you’ll remember such first events 20, 30, even 40 years from now as well. You may not remember the details about the sixth partner you hooked up with – but the first partner? You bet, according to the cover story in the current issue of Psychology Today about the importance of “firsts.”

Senior editor Jay Dixit, citing various experts, reports that experiences we have in our teens and early 20s stay with us the rest of our lives, far longer than similar events that occur from the mid-20s on.

“Intense emotional sensations etch first experiences deeply into memory,” he writes, “creating what psychologists call ‘flashbulb memories.’ Memories like our first kiss or tryst, our first glimpse of the ocean, our first day of school or the birth of a first child engage all our senses simultaneously.”

First experiences are powerful precisely because they are first. The glasses are clear; nothing clouds the vision. A first romantic relationship is especially this way, according to Laura Carpenter, author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences. Your behavior in relationships that come after your first will reflect, in part, the previous experience and the feelings it produced.

All of this argues for taking care with whom you share these first times. You’re making memories that can’t be erased. “Positive first experiences can inspire us for a lifetime,” Dixit says, “but negative ones can be hard to get past.”

If you do have a negative first experience, Mary-Frances O’Connor, a behavioral scientist whom Dixit quotes, suggests not running away from what has been hurtful. Place those memories into the larger story of who you are becoming, she says, who you want to be from here on out and who you want your partner to be.

One nice thing about getting older is that it offers us the chance to supplement not-so-great memories of earlier years with better ones.

Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, thinks of these remembrances as coins. In his poem, “This Much I Do Remember,” he writes that while listening to a woman talk in the kitchen after dinner, he looks over her bare shoulders at three oranges lying on the counter.

At that moment, he says, he can feel the scene as if it were painted within him. He ends the poem with these lines:

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
My middle name,
And the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
The small coin of that moment
Minted in the kingdom
That we pace through every day.

If you reached in your pocket or your pocketbook right now, what coins would you find? And would you stuff them quickly back where you found them, or hold them out to examine, one by one?