17 Oct
2026
First love hits differently when you are young. It can feel like the only good thing in your life, and when it ends, it can feel like the end of the world. Jonathan Anthony Burkett knows that feeling. In his memoir Neglected But Undefeated, he writes about the girl he met at church as a young teen, the girl he still calls his first love. Her story, and his, holds some real lessons for anyone nursing a first heartbreak.
In January 2001, early in his middle-school years, Jonathan met a girl at church. At first the two of them fought and said they hated each other. Then a friend pointed out what everyone else could already see: after every fight they smiled, and they could not keep their eyes off each other.
Jonathan asked her to be his girl. She said yes, and then they both just walked away from each other. As he put it in the book, “Weird, I know.” She was seeing someone else at the time, but eventually she ended that to be with Jonathan, which made him feel really good.
Home was a hard place for Jonathan in those years. His mother didn't care where he was, as long as he wasn't around her. He wrote, “I was desperate to be loved and to love someone, especially with all I still had to live through at home.” Another line from that chapter says it simply: “I was hungry for happiness to come back into my life.”
His girlfriend's mother looked out for him with a genuine smile and food. Later she kept a promise to help the two of them attend the same high school, so her daughter could help Jonathan stay out of trouble and finish his schoolwork.
The couple went to movies, shopped and had nights out. Jonathan's favorite memory is riding the huge waterslides together at Rapids Water Park in West Palm Beach.
Not everyone approved. People at church, who knew what was happening at home, mostly focused on keeping the two of them apart. When one church member told them to slow down, Jonathan asked him, “Why do you think I look for love from her?”
Looking back, Jonathan saw something valuable in that young relationship. “We were young, yes, and had not developed real emotions for each other as of yet. But we were giving our relationship what so many relationships nowadays lack, and that is time.”
They stayed together through middle school and into tenth grade. That patience, letting something grow instead of rushing it, became a theme he would return to again and again in his writing.
In 2003, during one of the hardest years of his life, she called him around nine o'clock at night and ended the relationship without letting him speak. Jonathan spoke to God and gave thanks anyway. Then he dropped to the floor, crying. He has said he cried a lot over that breakup.
Seven years later, he learned the real reason. Another girl had told her a false story about him, and it had spread around school. The breakup had been built on a rumor.
Even so, he still considers her his first love.
If you are going through your first heartbreak right now, here are a few things Jonathan's story suggests:
And remember that first love is a beginning, not a verdict on your worth. One heartbreak does not decide whether you are lovable, or whether love will find you again. Jonathan went on to write about love in poems and in books.
“It’s so simple to fall in love but it’s such a struggle to find true love.”
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett, Neglected But Undefeated
Jonathan's full story, including his first love, is in Neglected But Undefeated, and his thoughts on friendship and romance continue in his Friends 2 Lovers books. You can find them all on the Books page.
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