I hope you all had a great Valentine’s Day!

Once again, I was sin­gle, but I didn’t let that stop me from hav­ing fun with some friends. I’ve actu­ally been form­ing this post in my head all week now, and I was going to post it on Valentine’s Day, but I didn’t have access to a com­puter, and didn’t want to write a long post on my phone.

Dif­fi­cult break-​ups are immor­tal­ized in “the major­ity of white per­son art” with a spe­cial focus on first loves. (Yes, I know Hikki’s not white, but she grew up in New York City, so she was exposed to white culture.)

When I read The Game, one of the things Style men­tions is that the pick-​up com­mu­nity devel­oped for nerds who for one rea­son or another lacked nat­ural social skills, and the train­ing gave them those tools. He also men­tions that because of this lack of nat­ural skills, a lot of pick-​up artists were unsuc­cess­ful with their first loves. They then “put the pussy on a pedestal” and that fix­a­tion leads them to the pick-​up community.

It reminds me a movie I saw a long time ago. I don’t even remem­ber the title, actors, or major­ity of the plot line any­more, but it involved a group of friends doing a road trip across the coun­try. The girl in the group had a child­hood romance with a neigh­bor­hood boy, but it was bro­ken up before any­thing really hap­pened because her fam­ily moved away. She ide­al­izes this old flame and all her rela­tion­ships since then have been mea­sured against this ideal and failed. Well, since they are doing a road trip, they decide to stop by her old home­town and see if her first love still feels any­thing for her. Turns out, he’s mar­ried with kids, and a bit of a jerk to boot. But the kicker is that she meets her first love’s lit­tle brother, who was always into her and kept the keep­sake she exchanged with the older brother as she was mov­ing. He also reveals that the older brother was only try­ing to hit it all those years ago any­ways. (By the way, if you can tell me what movie I’m talk­ing about, I would really appre­ci­ate it… it’s been bug­ging me since I first started think­ing about this post.)

There seems to be a bit of truth to the idea. I don’t con­sciously make com­par­isons between love inter­ests, but I can under­stand how your first expe­ri­ences can influ­ence your atti­tudes towards love. So tell me, how did your first love turn out? Are you a Mar­shall, who is still with your first love and every­one else is jeal­ous of what you have, or a Bar­ney, whose first love was a dis­as­ter and you have dif­fi­culty with rela­tion­ships now, or some­thing in between, which I guess Ted is?