Everything happens for the first time. And the first crush, and the first love, and the first man. A flood of feelings overtakes us at that tender age when the soul is still naive and pure. The flair of romance turns off the instinct of self-preservation, the ability to objectively perceive both the object of love itself and everything connected with it. First love is rarely happy, but the intensity of passions surpasses all subsequent hobbies. Hearts that broke at this time, we at the very least put together piece by piece, but the glued heart loses its sonority and purity of sound in the future. When young women and older ladies ask for help, I ask the standard question: “Didn’t you hear the warning bells?” Was it really necessary to let the situation get so bad that you have to pick yourself up piece by piece?” “There were, of course,” they answer, alarming moments, but everything seemed that the relationship was harmonizing, I’ll redo it.” These thoughts led to the fact that women preferred to turn a blind eye to obvious errors, mistaking patterns for chance. Many people know the phenomenon of imprinting, which consists in very quickly learning certain vital actions. Imprinting can occur during certain critical periods of development. As Alexander Sergeevich wrote about Tatyana Larina: “The time has come, she fell in love!” A popular illustration of imprinting is that newly hatched ducklings follow the first moving object. Subsequently, they may ignore their mother if, ironically, they were the first to see a rolling ball or a running dog. This reaction itself is innate, but during the first hours after hatching, young birds must “imprint” the appearance of their mother. If during this period the ducklings do not see the duck, then later they will be afraid of it. Moreover, a duckling that has not encountered an object suitable for imprinting during the appropriate period will have a sharply disrupted behavior in the future: it will avoid contact with all living beings. In the human world, imprinting is a mechanism not only for biological survival, but also for the assimilation of images and behavioral scenarios , feelings, reasoning perceived at a certain critical moment of development. In moments of so-called imprinting vulnerability, the girl is in a state of special sensitivity to male images associated with scenarios of love behavior embedded in the genetic memory of the female line of the family. Each of us can be in a period of vulnerability of the special sensitivity of the psyche to the influence of a certain set of visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile stimuli, and behavioral scenarios. As a result, there is an automatic, unconscious connection between the internal attitudes of the betrothed mummer and the real man. In this sense, the meeting of lovers is fate, rock, fortune! Under the influence of hormonal storms, the connection and imprinting can be so strong that the girl loses not only the objectivity of perception, but also control over herself, following the voice of the heart in a romantic interpretation, but in most cases the call of instinct, which ensures, at the biological level, procreation with a certain set of physical and psychological characteristics. In this sense, the first love is a manifestation of the instinct for procreation. This is the time when Eros reigns supreme in the girl’s unconscious. And as the Arabic proverb says, “Only first love is true.” And in this statement, of course, there is some truth. First love can be considered as a time of undivided reign of erotic energies that have not yet encountered destructive, aggressive ones. Aggressive energy is necessary to overcome the fear of physical intimacy between a boy and a girl who will become a man and a woman. Girls need the courage to yield to the inevitability of penetration into the womb of the phallus. A young man needs courage, coupled with enough aggression to conquer, seduce and penetrate. First love is usually fleeting, but it can be so strong thatthat her memory will determine the choice of a partner for many years to come. Even if, under the influence of circumstances, these first relationships are destroyed, they will leave a deep mark. One of my clients, at the age of 16, fell in love with a classmate. There was no sex. After school, the young man was drafted into the army, where he died tragically. But love remained and did not let the girl go. And a few years later it seemed to her that she met her lover on the tram. It was an ordinary passenger, who vaguely resembled the deceased young man. But the girl was sure it was him. Memory can play a cruel joke. Spellbound, without taking her loving gaze away, she looked at the ordinary passenger, who understood the girl’s condition and did not miss the chance to take advantage of the situation. At the third stop, he took me by the hand, led me off the tram, took me to a nearby park and did what I did. The girl came to her senses in every sense, alone, on the grass, in soiled underwear. It often happens that the search for a sexual partner by an adult, completely independent person, is based on a subconscious desire to recreate some of the key features of the first sexual experience. An unsuccessful result of such searches may turn out to be a hidden factor contributing to the destruction of a marriage that is, at first glance, successful. Imprinting may be one of the causes of impaired sexual development, fetishism. First love in this sense is the filling with emotional and sensual content of the evolutionarily determined mechanism of imprinting, which realizes the instinct to continue kind. Imprinting “turns off” our heads, thereby turning off the fear of physical intimacy, defloration, ensuring procreation at the biological level. Imprinting can explain blindness, the loss of objectivity in the perception of the chosen one. Another reason that determines vulnerability at this time is the ancestral programs imprinted in the personal and family unconscious. Everyone is well aware of the fact that the daughters of alcoholics marry men who have certain types of addictions. In first love, and sometimes in subsequent relationships, a woman unconsciously strives to compensate for the lack of parental love, usually paternal love. Or she reconstructs the relationship with the “bad” mother, preferring toxic men, for the same reason. She chooses the psychological double of her mother in the person of a man in order to finally receive her love. The Eastern proverb “Only the first love is true” implies freedom from the rational search for benefits and following the voice of the heart. The process of generating feelings has the same properties as the process of imprinting. There is a sensual period in it (youth), when a person falls in love most often. It is relatively short, but its consequences are felt for a long time compared to the time of the feeling itself, and this process can take place in the depths of the soul throughout one’s life. The influence of first love, which never came true, is well shown in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita.” The work is based on the story of a teenager's unrealized first love. The main character, forty-year-old Humbert, is attracted to young girls of a special appearance and character. He sees the root of this unhealthy passion in his childhood crush on a girl named Annabelle Lee, whom he met at a resort at the age of thirteen. The vigilant governesses did not leave them alone. Then they parted ways. Soon after the separation, Annabelle died. Despite the fact that the teenagers experienced a very strong attraction to each other, they failed to close the gestalt and achieve physical intimacy due to the vigilant control of the governesses. After parting, the teenagers in love wrote letters to each other. A kind of telepathic connection has formed between them. Having matured, Humbert continues to dream of a connection with the “nymphet”, but does not dare to fulfill his dreams for fear of the law; he has to make do with the services of young prostitutes, and subsequently he marries a younger, girl-like woman. Soon his marriage falls apart, and, having improved his mental health,health in a sanatorium, Humbert goes to a small town to continue his literary studies in peace and quiet. He rents a room from a thirty-five-year-old widow named Charlotte Haze, who is raising a twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores. Humbert is shocked by Dolores' resemblance to the deceased Annabelle and decides to stay in the house. In Lolita, Humbert saw his first love, realizing his teenage desire as a forty-year-old man. Gestalt closed, but the participants in the drama - mother and daughter - passed away. Humbert has lost his only love. The statement “love is blind” is explained from the standpoint of animal psychology by the special sensitivity of the psyche in adolescence to a set of genetically encoded stimuli and reactions of a woman to a man. The imprinting mechanism, triggered by hormonal storms, leads to us falling in love with men, reproducing the mistakes of our parents with mathematical precision. Cupid's arrows, i.e. imprinting, choose a target according to the characteristics of generic programs accumulated in previous generations and parental behavior scenarios. Children often do not notice the destructiveness of parental behavior; the unconscious prefers not to see what the child’s psyche cannot cope with. This childhood blindness already in adolescence leads to the idealization of the chosen one. A girl on autopilot does not see what she did not notice in her parents. But sometimes you have to pay for the mistakes made during this period throughout your life. Actually, this is the rake on which we can dance endlessly, collapsing and rebuilding in relationships. Until we are visited by the brilliant thought that the problem may not be in the canned food, but in the conservatory, i.e. not in men, but in the characteristics of the soul that attracts or chooses men of a certain psychotype. Looking through the stories of unsuccessful first love in my memory, I decided to stop at two. In both cases, it is obvious that more experienced men are exploiting the naivety of young girls. But in the first story, the girl met a personally immature mama’s boy. In the second, Don Juan consciously uses the feelings of a girl inexperienced in love. Case 1. Vera, a nineteen-year-old university student, asked for help because she could not get out of a relationship that was burdening her. Instead of ardent love, there is boredom, guilt and dull irritation. How long can this all continue? Tired of it. The man obviously did not understand that the old feelings did not exist and could not exist. When she met Alexei, she was fifteen and he was twenty-seven. We met in a club for fans of a famous Western rock band. Alexey quickly turned the naive schoolgirl’s head with poems and songs, and soon something happened that usually happens between a man and a woman, although from the point of view of the law it is classified as seduction of a minor. For Vera, who did not know her father from early childhood, everything that happened seemed like a fairy tale come true . First sex is like a shock. The attention of an adult man, who did not especially spoil her with excesses even in the candy-bouquet period, was enough to maintain the fire of passion. The girl’s mother, who returned from a business trip, understood everything and began to urgently look for a man with an apartment so that her daughter could arrange personal happiness. It should be noted that the apartment in which mother and daughter lived was purchased with a mortgage, and at the time the “groom” moved in, the bank loan was still being paid off. Although my mother could barely make ends meet, she nevertheless did not ask for money either for utility costs, housekeeping, or to cover the loan, she got out as best she could. Moreover, she went to live with a man with an apartment, without feeling the slightest affection for him. She sacrificed herself for the personal happiness of her daughter, before whom she felt a colossal sense of guilt. Unsettled personal life, did not save a family for the child, no savings for old age, only debts. The daughter and mother, raised on the great Russian literature, felt awkward in indicating the need to pay money for accommodation and food, preferring to be above commercialism, also because of pseudo-pride“conditionally” poor people. In a word, provincial Alexey enjoyed all the benefits, including the charms of a young girl, absolutely free of charge, i.e. for nothing. Although, perhaps I am not entirely objective. The man compensated for everything in hard currency - in poetry and songs. The evenings were brightened up with songs accompanied by a guitar. Alexey, being on a stable salary and a good position, as they say, didn’t give a damn. He pretended or he really didn’t understand. Vera and her mother delicately waited, and suddenly their conscience would awaken, and even in such volumes that they would not have to think about their daily bread. Vera graduated from school with a gold medal and easily entered the university. Sometimes there was no money for travel, Alexey did not think about whether the girl he loved had money for the metro and breakfast. And at the university, a teacher fell in love with Vera. Against the background of which, Alexey looked not only faded, but in general did not look at all in every sense. Alexey continued to live in Vera’s apartment, and she, being a well-bred girl, could not point to the door. She just went to live with the professor, leaving the “groom” the keys to her own apartment. The young man remained to live in the apartment, while Vera’s mother continued to pay loans and utility bills from the sales manager’s salary on interest, living in someone else’s apartment of someone else’s man. Mother and daughter spared Alexey’s pride, who believed absolutely sincerely, as is typical for any narcissist , who left his mother for the capital, that everything should be given to him for free, solely for his outstanding merits and incomparable charms. At some point, it dawned on him that Vera would not return, and he needed to leave the three-room apartment of a young girl who had recklessly given it away for free use everything that belonged to her. A harsh reality loomed before the young man in the form of a “killed” rented apartment near the devil, for which he had to pay a third of his salary; oddly enough, a magic pot and a self-assembled tablecloth were not included in the package. And Vera is an angular girl, for whom songs with a guitar are in performed by a home-grown bard and missionary sex were the ultimate dream, she turned into a fatal beauty, which the men she met looked at. When Alexey, who had so successfully solved problems with the help of a young girl, objectively assessed the scale of the losses, he instantly saw the light. I had an insight: living at the expense of women is not good. The middle manager began to repent, beating his chest, probably trying to knock greed with all its guts out of his soul. It turned out that he simply obeyed his mother, who strictly punished him not to marry a Muscovite student and not to give money to her mother. The story perfectly illustrates the proverb “for lack of fish, there is cancer,” as well as the popular opinion that love is blind. Having gained experience, Vera I recalled my first love with irony. But the aftertaste and frustration remained. Fortunately, the professor, unlike his young rival, was not stingy, and did a lot for the professional development and career of his chosen one. But Alexey did not want to miss out on luck. He continued to cling to his former beloved, promised to correct mistakes, i.e. give money. He offered to formalize the relationship and go on a honeymoon to Italy. The professor, of course, provided patronage, but due to the difference in age, he had no intention of getting married. Vera could not make the final choice between the professor and Alexei. At the age of 19, it seemed to her that a white light had come together like a wedge on these two men. And then only old age, loneliness, poverty, oblivion, if not married to Alexei or kept by the professor. A half-starved childhood and the absence of a man in the house, of course, determined uncertainty about the future. Before my eyes was the example of a mother who was barely making ends meet, over whom a ten-year mortgage hung like a sword of Damocles. For these reasons, too, it was difficult for the girl to show determination and cold-bloodedness and clearly say to her ex-man: “Thanks, no. Sorry, no". Vera was pretty tired of Alexey, his greed, and the long hand of his mother from Perm, thanks to whose sensitive leadership the relationship fell apart. I had to figure it out.