The First Love !?  Georgeta Bondarencu, Psychologist of ACCEPT          The first love is always a reference point in our life. We like to remember the first thrill of love, the flight feeling that accompanied it.          The first kiss, the first hold of hands, the first walk, the first words of love, the first night – all these are usually pleasant moments, about which we think full of nostalgia.          In this article, I intend to speak about some specific features of a homosexual’s, bisexual’s and transsexual’s first love. One could ask: is there something different about it? Isn’t first love the same for everybody?

        However, during my counselling activity, I was able to meet many specific situations. For example, a very few people in the community were lucky enough to live their first love as I described it above. Many of them were astonished, afraid and despaired to find out that they feel a same-sex attraction. In their case, the first love also brought a lot of questions: “why is this happening to me?”, “why am I like this?”, “what does this mean?”, “am I normal?”, “am I the only one to feel that way?”. Well – many of those who ask themselves such questions have at some moment the feeling that they are alone in the world. A strange feeling, which was condemning them to solitude. Some of them had no idea what means being a gay or a lesbian. It is a sad reality, which is due to lack of information and homophobia, which are so spread in our society.
        In the same time with first love’s thrills, feelings of guilt, shame, fear and depression appear. It is a weird thing, isn’t it? However, it happens quite often. Then the person in question starts searching. “There must be other people like me!” And there are.
        In just a few cases, everything is just the way it should be – the first love is really a wonderful, uncomplicated love.
        In yet other cases, the first love had no chance from the very beginning, because its subject was heterosexual. In this situation, a dilemma frequently arises: “should I tell him/her? How will he/she react? Will he/she accept me or reject me?”
        However, sometimes friendship wins.
        I mentioned the idea of being accepted by others – but a much more delicate problem is that of self-acceptance, of accepting one’s own sexual identity. Sometimes it is harder to convince yourself that the love you feel for another is normal, than to convince the others. Without the others’ acceptance, self-acceptance can be very difficult to achieve – as the human being is strongly influenced by the society’s opinion on him/her. One frequently judges one’s own behaviour according to the way society regards it.
        Self-acceptance is generally achieved in several steps.
        After discovering his/her own sexual orientation (an often frightening discovery, which is accompanied by guilt, shame, fear and so on), the person in question starts looking for other people with the same sexual orientation. This search aims not only at finding a partner, but also at identifying with somebody. In case this identification is possible, the person begins the process of accepting his/her own sexual identity.
        On the contrary, if this doesn’t happen, things evolve in a negative direction. It is the reason for which depressions, introversion and loneliness appear; sometimes, the gay or the lesbian tries to kill him/herself. This attempted suicide is somehow attention calling – a cry for others’ help.
        What should we do, in order to avoid such situations? Maybe we should try to educate the society we live in, to tell everybody that we exist, that we are not the way others describe us, to show ourselves.
        I had an interesting experience the other day. An old friend of mine visited the ACCEPT office driven by curiosity – or maybe in the attempt to find out more things about the gay community. She knew for a long time where I work. However, it was a rather unpleasant experience for her. I talked to her latter and she told me that, seeing some of the people coming over, she found it even harder to believe that they existed.
        Do you think this situation can change? I think so. Until then, you should do something in that direction, you should offer another image of yourselves to the world we all live in. This way, the “first love” will really become LOVE, for each of us.