As the title says, my first love whom I’ve missed dearly has just contacted me and it’s thrown my world upside down. We met when we were both 14 and spent a little under 4 years together. It was a wildly inappropriate relationship from the start by the standards today, but we both suffered abusive and absent parents, so found each other. We spent all the time we could together, at the cost of our studies, friends, what little family there was and all else. We were absolutely codependent, physically living as adults and were each other’s worlds.
I’m now marred to my wife of 20 years and we have a home together, no children but a successful life by any measure. I love my wife dearly and tell her almost everything, she knows about the contact and encouraged me to start a conversation with my first love. I’ve avoided difficult things in the past, employing avoidance rather than facing things head on, and this is why she encouraged me.
It’s been wonderful to speak to my first love again, and it’s brought up emotions I thought long gone. I’m not sleeping, eating little and completely preoccupied by thoughts of what we once had; I feel love sick, but for a squandered past, not a realistic present. I’m bipolar so this is particularly dangerous for me and for anyone else out there like me, I’m working to try and stay grounded, away from the mania and get some rest, but it’s hard.
I broke off the relationship back then, because I was afraid of what we were committing to and because I was being manipulated by a very toxic group of people who in hindsight, only wanted to sow chaos and take pleasure in my humiliation. I was not diagnosed back then and so was particularly vulnerable when experience the extremes. If I knew now what I knew then, I would not have been so reckless with her emotions, as it caused her immense pain and led her on a path of self destruction for a number of years.
She’s has moved back to near where I live after being on the other side of the country for the past nearly 3 decades. I desperately want to meet her for coffee and look at her eyes again, but I’m also supremely cautious because I don’t want to upset my wife and am also afraid of what I might be feeling.
Any advice gratefully received on how I navigate this. I should also mention that whereas I don’t have children, my first love does and two of them are quite young, one is an adult.
—EDIT—
Thank you all of you for your advice and guidance, and for your kindness in share it with me. I ate some food last night and have slept, which has brought the mania back down to a more manageable level, and with that I’ve taken on board and heard all that you’ve collectively said.
My plan is to talk to my wife this weekend about what I’ve been going through and ask how she would feel about having a coffee with my first love. I really thought through what matters most to me and it’s the present, the future and that is with my wife. She’s a wonderful woman who has helped me through so much and my life now wouldn’t even be recognisable to 18 year old me. Through her I found the strength to recover from addiction, face my mental health demons, go to University and become the successful privacy lawyer I am today. All of this would not have happened without her strength and support.
If you’re reading this you probably wonder why the voice above the edit, and the voice below it, are so different in tone; the answer is my bipolar disorder and it’s sometimes extremely hard for me to see that change happening.
I say that being a person who is actually longtime friends with an ex. Being able to do that does require some emotional maturity - from both parties. Pointing out that fact doesn’t even help 99% of the time because every relationship is different - and in some cases, you genuinely can’t be friends with an ex, because sometimes there’s a damn good reason you two broke up.
Anyways: OP, I’m gonna give my two cents. First cent: talk to your wife about this, and bring up how you have been feeling because that’s also a part of confronting stuff like this, which your wife seems to be advocating for. That should’ve been the top comment of advice!
Second cent: you and this ex have had basically no communication for like, 3 decades, right? You don’t know this person anymore. That high-school girl in your memories? She’s gone now, doesn’t exist anymore. Now you take that context away from her and treat this person as somebody entirely new, more or less. This girl you haven’t talked to in 3 decades is a (I am assuming) single mom who has two kids, and has moved to near where you live now. Kind of a fuckin strange coincidence if you ask me, but those can and do genuinely happen as a true coincidence. If you do end up meeting with her, you’re not meeting up with your high-school sweetheart; you’re meeting up with a 45-year-old lady with kids (and once again assuming, maybe a broken marriage or two). What you have with your wife now will never be worth giving up for this random-ass lady.
I know I said two cents, but here’s a third: if she tries to start stuff with you, leave, cut contact, and tell your wife - even if deep down, you really, really want to do stuff with your ex. In your particular scenario, given your history with her, if she does actually do something like that, she’s disrespecting you as a person because she would be ignoring what you have built with your wife in the life you lived without the ex for the most part - that’s more than enough reason to not engage in that kind-of behavior with a person like that. Not saying she will do that, but if that’s ever a bridge you need to cross, better to burn that bridge entirely.
I’m sorry I missed this comment when you posted it, but your second cent is an absolute gem, truly a series of thoughts I’d not considered. I’m not the same person I was 30 years, so why would she be.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this. I’ve put an update above on my plans and it follows what you’ve advised, I really appreciate the advice my friend.