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"    Q: I had my very first boyfriend, whom I&amp;#039;ll call Tony, when I was 15 and he was 13. We dated for six months, and then my mom and his grandpa, whose house we were renting, had an issue, and we had to move. My brother asked me to break up with Tony because of the conflict, so we ended up dating behind everyone&amp;#039;s back. Tony broke up with me a year later, and that same day I found out that he had left me for his uncle&amp;#039;s former girlfriend, whom I&amp;#039;ll call Anne, who was in school with us. This was very painful. For the next year and a half, I watched them being happy as can be together, while Anne was mean to me every time she and I were alone. I graduated and moved on with my life.  24 years later, in June of 2008, Tony contacted me on classmates.com. He sent me an e-mail apologizing for how he had ended our relationship. At the time I was in the middle of a divorce, and he was ending a 12-year relationship with his kids&amp;#039; mom. We became friends and began to talk about the past and how painful it was.  I soon learned that although Tony never married Anne, they&amp;#039;d kept in touch all these years. Anne is now married with kids, and Tony and Anne have daughters around the same age who do cheerleading in the same town (sometimes for the same squad), so they spend time together at practices.  My husband left November of that year, and Tony&amp;#039;s girlfriend left a month later. Soon after that, we started a relationship that we hid from everyone, mainly out of consideration for our kids. Soon after, I got a mass forwarded email from Tony and noticed that one of the other recipients was Anne. I got very upset and told Tony that I really didn&amp;#039;t need her in my life. At this time Tony had already started talking about marriage, telling me he had never had the desire to be married before. He apologized and claimed he would end all communication with her. But it&amp;#039;s continued, and just recently I found out that Tony has been flirting with some of his friends from high school on Facebook, too. Tony and I got engaged on May 15 2009. I recently broke the engagement since I have a hard time trusting him. My question for you is: Why do men have a hard time speaking the truth, even if it&amp;#039;s painful? (Being afraid of the consequences is not a valid reason.) Am I wasting my time?   A: Here&amp;#039;s what I remember about being 13: I had no impulse control, thanks to hormones.  I hung out at Burger King.  I had a heart-to-heart with my most trusted adult advisor at the time, the 21-year-old guy who worked at the local comic book store (if I remember correctly, his nickname was Maltman) about whether or not I should try marijuana. If you&amp;#039;re curious, &amp;quot;Maltman&amp;quot; strongly advised against trying weed because he was concerned I might &amp;quot;get hooked.&amp;quot;  I spent most of my down time locked in the bathroom.  I discovered I was growing hair strange places, like my belly.  I had a bicycle.  The end. Considering that &amp;quot;Maltman&amp;quot; was my go-to guy for most of my &amp;quot;big stuff&amp;quot; during this period, I don&amp;#039;t think the girls who I was in giggly, mall-centric, week-long &amp;quot;relationships&amp;quot; with got to know the best of me. My point is, did you really think rekindling a relationship from that moment in your life was a great idea? Did alarm bells not go off when the exact same issues that ravaged your star-crossed adolescent affair twenty some years ago reared their heads again? The lesson here is not about men, and it&amp;#039;s not about people whose real names aren&amp;#039;t Tony and Anne, and it&amp;#039;s not about a love triangle 24 years in the making. It&amp;#039;s about the perils of the internet. Classmates.com (I don&amp;#039;t even know what that is, is it like Friendster for oldies? Should I check it out?), and Facebook are great for getting a sneak peek at the lives of people who you knew way back when\u2014and an easy way to check in and say, &amp;quot;Hi&amp;quot; to those people.  But sweet Tweeter Frampton, this is the cautionary tale of what happens when you go too far, and use the internet carelessly for some poorly conceived do-over! I know it&amp;#039;s hard. When you look at all those old friends and lovers on the computer, the illusion that you can have them back, thereby recapturing your youth, can be overwhelming.  But ultimately, when you allow those decades-old feelings to get the better of you, it&amp;#039;s not the fountain of youth you&amp;#039;ve discovered; it&amp;#039;s the regressive quality of social media. And the next thing you know, you&amp;#039;ve gone from being a wife, mother, and professional with some 30 years of adult life experience, to having the same conversations about boys and mean girls that you had when you were 15. That&amp;#039;s not progress; that&amp;#039;s getting Facebooked.  My advice is stop chasing ghosts. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/mens-perspective/a11917/first-love-relationship-advice/>