'My first boyfriend died... and now I don't think I can love again.'

Marianna Manson reflects on the death of her first love... and the impact that formative experience has had on her, a decade on.

Thanks so much, as always, for supporting Crocuses In The Snow. You reading, sharing and commenting each week helps me so much, so thank you. Here’s a quick introduction from me, before I hand over this space to Marianna…

When I let the hissing in, it tells me to shut up. That you’re bored of my teeny tiny violin, wailing about a loss that happened almost two decades ago. I tell myself I need to move on, be quiet and get over it.

That’s one of the things about long-term loss, we can often feel as if we’re not ‘worthy’ of our own melancholy, that because we still miss someone or are impacted by their disappearance from our lives, that means we’re not ‘strong.’ But when you lose someone, you don’t just lose them and who they could have been in your future, but also, who you could have been, had they been beside you. It leaves you questioning, years, decades after the initial loss, haunted often, not just by them, but an iteration of yourself that might have existed if the dice hadn’t fallen this way.

It's accepting, rather than desperately denying, this reality that has helped me find peace. I’ve sewn my losses under my skin, a process that was – once – piercing and painful, and has left me tender but, in a way, more whole. I am who I am because of all that I have lost. I am not, and never will be, over it…. But I am no longer engulfed by it.

Telling stories, like Marianna’s below, and creating a space where we can open up and evaluate the true impact of grief, together, has always been my aim. That’s what I need to banish this conjured cruelty I can, at times, inflict on myself. I believe it’s by sharing our experiences, both in the immediate aftermath of a loss, and also how it’s shaped us years on, that we can begin to let go of the inner hissing. It’s how we can accept the person we are now, the person we were in our pasts as well as the person we will be in our future.

I’ll hand over to Marianna, and let her tell you her story…

The first time I rode on the back of the motorbike, I didn’t have the right shoes.

I was in £6 ballet flats as I pulled myself onto the bike, my hands gripping the waist of my boyfriend, my stomach full of new love butterflies. By the time we’d completed our maiden journey together the soles of those cheap, off-the-hanger Primark shoes had nearly melted through. I had rested them on the exhaust, unaware of the foot pins, a much more sensible place to keep my feet. I had no idea what I was doing… but that didn’t matter. I was 18-years-old and flinging myself into life, and love.

By the end of my relationship with him two years later, I owned my own helmet, gloves, and a full set of proper leathers. By the time he died, another 12 months down the line, those possessions, possessions I’d bought with a future in mind, belonged to a stranger. I’d sold them all on eBay for half of what I’d paid.

That bike became symbolic of the intoxicating freedom of my late teens and early twenties. It was a big, proper motorbike, too, a 900cc sports bike (that he would go on to trade in for a 1200cc version), with no muffler on the engine so that when he would ‘surprise’ me by coming to collect me from college, the surprise would be ruined by the fact I could quite literally hear him coming from a mile or two away – though the novelty of having a sexy man come and pick me up in front of all my peers definitely never wore off. Short of actually having sex on it (we prudently waited until I’d bought my first car for that) that bike saw almost as much action as I did during those years. It also saw some pretty near misses – like the time I fell asleep on the back of it on the motorway, just for the briefest of seconds, while my hand were snugly wedged into his jacket pockets.

If this is all sounds glamorous and sexy and slightly reckless, it’s because that’s what time, and tragedy, has done to these years. They’ve become fossilised in my mind over the past decade of reading from the same script. I’ve become trapped in the loop of our story, unable to separate the fact from the fiction of that over-romanticised period of my life.

When I got the news of his death, we hadn’t spoken in a year. We’d broken up, just as I had turned 20. We’d moved from London to Birmingham together, where I started university. The move was a stupid decision for teenagers in love, initiating a destructive chain of events which eventually lead to a deeply painful break up. When the call came through, the name of a mutual friend flashing up on my screen, I was still holding onto a heartbreak that was no closer to healing. I thought he’d fallen off his bike. He hadn’t. He’d killed himself.

I’m now 32-years-old and I still feel stuck in that place, that body, that love. I don’t go on dating apps, I don’t succumb to romance, I no longer throw myself in. I was still in love with him when he died, and I never got to move on from a relationship with a living person who was, in turn, moving on from me. Each new relationship is held up against what I had with him, and they do not compete. I’ve had one boyfriend since, who I loved… but not like Him.

My memories of that time of my life are wrapped up in so much that I’ve never been able to properly emerge from the wreckage.

This might sound self-indulgent. You’d think ten plus years would be enough to get over a break-up, or a death. Or even both together. I (incredibly) have friends who’ve been through the exact same thing who have managed it; I’ve read authors who’ve spun the experience of bereavement by suicide into beautiful books in the hopes of finding some solution to my not-so-unique predicament. But what I’m ‘not over’ is not the relationship itself, which was deeply flawed and, at times, mutually toxic. The juvenile kind of love that masochistic teenagers like to indulge in. It’s the scar left behind of losing the person who I’d still believed was the love of my life, even a year after our break-up, to suicide.

Your early twenties are a transformative time, particularly if you’re the kind of high maintenance twenty-one-year-old that I was. For such a long time, my first boyfriend and his subsequent suicide occupied the vast majority of my very being, and I can’t really pinpoint when it stopped being utterly tragic and turned into the dull, sad reality of my life.

As my twenties have given way to my thirties, and this great Shakespearean love story that defined my hedonistic younger years and its implications have settled into the grooves of my neural pathways, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to actually draw a line under it. As I’ve tried to explain to various therapists, the tendrils of that time are so sprawling and wrapped up in such a tight knot that it’s impossible to find the right thread to start untangling it from first. It might well not even be real, but when the same narrative has been playing over and over in your head for this long, it’s difficult to know the difference.

And that’s the crux of it, really. I lost more than just an ex-boyfriend, or even the chance to be with him again in the future. I lost  the ability to grow into a woman who wasn’t permanently scarred by this specific kind grief, who didn’t have to grow around this intimate trauma. If he hadn’t died, would we have gotten back together? Or would we have both moved on with different people? Would I hate him? Would I still suspect he was my soulmate, but made peace with it many years ago? If he hadn’t died, would I even believe in soulmates? Would I be taking such a lackadaisical approach to finding love now, if I didn’t at the back of my mind believe that I’d already had the great love of my life and, really, what’s the point? If he hadn’t died would I be on the apps, putting myself out there, meeting two men a week like my single friends – who are imploring me to do the same – are?

The thing is, I have spent my whole adult life circling these ‘what ifs’ around and around my head. This April will mark eleven years since he died, and while (as Catriona has so poignantly illustrated in this newsletter) it’s universally accepted that you can never really get over grief, you do learn to live with it. And I’ve come to realise that for me, when it comes to love and the potential romances I hold myself back from, these are things that I have, perhaps, knowingly sacrificed. Throughout our lives we’re constantly making choices, going down one path, aware that – by doing so – we’re missing out on another. I can’t say what’s coming next for me, but nor can I keep fighting and trying so hard to shatter this love blockage within me, when perhaps it’s just who I am. I’ve got a career, friends, a place to live. Romantic love is just one facet of a full life that many people can live happily without, and that’s where I’m at now.

I wanted to round off Marianna’s story with something along the lines of how wonderful she is, and how loveable she is, and how I believe romantic love will be her future. But by even thinking that I am only playing into a make-believe notion that we must find ‘the one’ to be happy. When (what I believe) we really need to be happy is an understanding of ourselves, and appreciation and gratitude for what we have, day-to-day, both big and small.

If you’d like to share your story with me, please do get in touch. You don’t have to be a professional writer like Marianna (you can follow her on Instagram here) as I’ll edit, and coach you through the process.