By Rey Urbiztondo
There is a particular advantage in being someone’s first. No comparison, only the slow work of learning together—the shared awkwardness, the mutual uncertainty, the permission to be inexperienced together. There is something comforting about discovering the rules of intimacy alongside someone equally unsure, making mistakes, and learning from them together. These relationships are often dismissed as naïve, but I have never seen them that way. To me, they feel protected, insulated from and unburdened by expectations formed elsewhere.
Standing at the beginning of someone else’s middle is a struggle in its own right. It is a quiet, invisible weight, rarely acknowledged.
I entered a serious relationship at eighteen—which many would argue is right on schedule, though maturity matters more than age. There had been quiet interest in the past, but I could not meet it with true sincerity then yet at all. That shifted in college when I met someone whose interest initially escaped my notice, until time made room for my own.
What followed was not the euphoric clarity pop culture promises. I stepped into a story already in progress, dense with emotional context I had no hand in writing. I was learning how to be in a relationship and, at the same time, I was learning how to live alongside its past. My firsts were colliding with someone else’s middles, and I didn’t yet know how to approach that reality with much grace.
Being new to something another has already lived through comes with acute vulnerability. You measure your reactions against invisible standards and wonder if your hesitations are shortcomings or simply the growing pains of arriving late to a lesson already in session.
So what did an eighteen-year-old me do? I ran to my more experienced friends, looking for advice, validation, or at least a shortcut to bypass all the hassle. But even then (as they told me, and as I eventually learned) there was no way around it. There are just some things that can only be understood by getting them wrong first.
No one prepares you for how uneven the learning curve feels when one partner has loved and lost. Your honest missteps may register as red flags to them—mistakes they’ve outgrown. Experience narrows as conflict becomes familiar, arguments predictable, attachments souring into resentment, love wearing itself thin. That revealed to me how the benefit of hindsight, as it turns out, is not always generosity.
For the person experiencing firsts, this can feel like being graded against a syllabus you never received. You are asked to perform emotional competence on a timeline that is not your own. Falter, and the response may be a quiet withdrawal: I have already done this once, and I’m not sure I’m willing to do it again.
But the experienced partner isn’t unkind; rather, it makes them human, albeit loving cautiously with exit strategies and less appetite for risk. To the novice, this feels like indifference, unworthy of patience. The truth is: the tragedy is not that people carry pasts with them; it is that we sometimes forget how much grace our own firsts once required. Amid uneven expectations, space remains for your imperfect firsts. Perhaps the truest measure of love is not how flawlessly we fit into another’s history, but how fully we allow ourselves to become.
BIONOTE: Rey Jose Marie I. Urbiztondo (b. August 16, 2005) is a third-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing student at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. With a background in journalism and community development, Rey has developed strong skills in publishing, design, and communication. Originally from Surigao City, Surigao del Norte, he completed his secondary education at Silliman University in Dumaguete, majoring in STEAM.
Rey has held various leadership and creative roles, including serving as Head Cartoonist and Columnist for multiple publications, such as the Weekly Sillimanian and Pauliglobe. His community engagement extends to co-directing projects with the Rotaract Club of UST-NU and UST Nursing Association of Student Achievers.
