Charles opens his memoir with a vow: He has come to the sea “to learn to be good” (2), and the project depends on a single belief he has carried since boyhood: that Mary Hartley Smith, his childhood love, is the “alpha and omega” of his existence (75). He makes this declaration before seeing Hartley again, and when he first sees her, in a “brown tent-like dress” and smudged lipstick (110), his certainty about her and her role in his life doesn’t falter; instead, it becomes even firmer. Charles writes in his letter to her that he can “make her happy” even though he writes this without yet knowing anything about her life (175). He reflects, “In the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other” (135), but this conclusion is based on nostalgia for youth and the remembered intensity of first love. He holds this belief throughout the novel, even as evidence to the contrary continues to build, proving the powerful influence of the nostalgia of first love.

Even in the face of Hartley’s direct disagreement, Charles remains committed to his view of the undying nature of their relationship. The most extreme example of this is Hartley’s captivity at Shruff End. She says “I want to go home” again and again over four days (290), in language so plain that Charles’s counterarguments become equally direct, taking the shape of refusal rather than persuasion. He calls her unhappy; she does not deny it, but neither does she describe a wish to leave Ben. He argues that her freedom requires staying with him; she says, with flat clarity, that a decision to go with him would require “a miracle in [her] mind” (305). The book establishes Charles’s reasoning early on and reinforces it, but then it juxtaposes Hartley’s actual sentences against it. Each clear and definitive statement that she want to “go home” undermines his elaborate rationalizations.

Near the end of the novel, Charles finally begins to see how his nostalgic ideas of first love have led him astray. The aphorism Charles repeats early on in the narrative, “On n’aime qu’une fois, la première” (76), roughly translated as “You only love once, the first time,” returns in the Postscript. He adds the comment, “What a lot of folly I have run through in aid of that stupid gallicism!” (486), an admission that his adherence to the idea of the primacy of first love led him to his “folly.” Hartley vanishes to Australia, and Charles finally arrives at the idea that “[s]he was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her” (494). Although this statement seems to highlight his growth and changing perspective, he qualifies it by adding that “the idea was not senseless or unworthy” (494). Although he understands, he is also determined not to entirely give up his ideas. Charles’s late admission to Lizzie, “I’m bound to her, bound, it’s—it’s absolute” (357), illustrates his return to his earlier ideas, despite everything that has happened. His stubborn adherence to the idea, despite a narrative that reveals its hollowness, illustrates the depth of the intensity of first love and its continued nostalgic power.