61 pages • 2 hours read
Judy BlumeForever...
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Challenges of First Love
Katherine and Michael fall in love quickly and earnestly, promising each other “Forever” (79), and through their relationship, the novel explores the challenges of first love. While Katherine and Michael’s relationship is meaningful to both, they learn that first love does not always necessarily mean last love.
As Katherine’s relationship with Michael becomes increasingly serious, her parents try to encourage her to remember that “you’re too young to make lifetime decisions. [...] You have to consider the future” (81). Katherine’s parents are open about their own experiences with first love and early dating as a way to show Katherine that just because she loves Michael now, it does not mean that she has to settle down with him. In the throes of first love, Katherine initially rejects her parents’ views about first love, sex, and relationships, but these conversations provide an important foundation for her as she navigates her first love.
First love poses challenges for Katherine because she feels that now she has promised Michael “forever,” she cannot break that promise, even as her feelings naturally shift and evolve. Katherine begins to question her relationship with Michael only when she goes to New Hampshire for the summer to work at a camp. It is as if the heady spell of first love is broken for her as she spends her first extended period away from Michael since they began dating in January.
As her feelings for Theo develop, and she acts on those feelings, kissing him in the wake of learning of her grandfather’s death, Katherine feels increasingly guilty for her attraction to someone else and writes Michael a letter in explanation: “I think I still love you but something’s changed. [...] You must be thinking what a rotten person I am. Well, believe me, I’m thinking the same thing” (198-99). Instead of viewing her changing feelings as a natural sign of growing up and growing apart from her first love, Katherine believes herself to be a “rotten person.” She rips that letter up and goes as far as to try and make her relationship with Michael work, but ultimately breaks down and tells him the truth of her confused feelings, which results in their breakup.
As painful as their breakup is for Katherine, she moves past the experience, learning the important lesson that first love does not have to be one’s last. While Katherine feels shame over her feelings for Theo, she ultimately does not experience shame in the wake of their breakup, and in fact, when she sees Michael, she wishes to tell him “that I will never be sorry for loving him. That in a way I still do—that maybe I always will. I’ll never regret one single thing we did together because what we had was very special” (208). Katherine illustrates her growth and maturity in this line: She can accept that her relationship with Michael is over without resorting to dismissing the time that they did spend together as unimportant or inherently meaningless simply because it did not last. Seeing the value of first love but ending the relationship because she is not ready for forever also demonstrates that she has internalized many of the messages she received from her parents about not making a lifelong commitment while still a teenager.
Although they do not end up together, Katherine and Michael do find a kind of “forever.” There is something permanent and immutable about the first person one loves and the space they occupy in one’s memory, regardless of how the relationship ends. Katherine decides for herself that “I think it’s just that I’m not ready for forever” (208), but she can carry the memories she made with her first love, looking back on them fondly and without regret. With this resolution, the text concludes that first love does not have to last for it to have been meaningful, beautiful, and important. This understanding adds another layer to the meaning of the book’s title, when what remains forever is the memory not the relationship itself.
How Perspectives on Love Change
As Katherine grows up throughout the text and experiences her first love and heartbreak, her perspective on love likewise grows and changes. Katherine’s relationship with Michael is the central plot point in the text, and the factor that most shapes Katherine’s perspective on love. As her relationship with Michael begins, evolves, and ultimately ends, Katherine refines her belief of what love is.
When Katherine begins dating Michael, she is wary of telling him she loves him too early. She thinks back to her relationship from the previous year with a boy named Tommy: “‘I like him a lot…that’s all I know right now.’ I wasn’t going to say I loved Michael yet. I was too quick to think I’d loved Tommy Aronson and he and I never even got to be friends” (29). This quote illustrates Katherine’s perspective on love in several ways. In saying that she likes Michael, but that’s “all she knows right now,” Katherine shows that she is not quick to rush into thinking she is in love with Michael. She cites how she made that mistake before with her first boyfriend and that she and Tommy never even became friends. This is another important point, as it illustrates Katherine’s belief that one should be friends with the person they are in love with, adding another dimension to the relationship beyond romantic love.
Katherine’s understanding of love evolves as she and Michael grow closer, and she falls in love with him, telling him so for the first time during their ski trip to Vermont. She and Michael begin a sexual relationship, and Katherine waits to take that step with Michael until she falls in love with him: “I can’t imagine what the first time would be like with someone you didn’t love” (107). Katherine comes to see Michael as her best friend, and as their impending separation for the summer looms, she becomes increasingly despondent at not being near him: “We lay in each other’s arms and I thought, there are so many ways to love a person. This is how it should be—forever” (175). The word “forever” appears frequently when Katherine speaks of her relationship with Michael: an allusion to their promising each other “forever” when they first express their love for one another and to the necklace Michael gives Katherine for her birthday.
Forever is an easy promise for Katherine to make to both Michael and herself when they are together, but as they spend more time apart, Katherine becomes enamored with another counselor at her camp. Suddenly, Katherine begins to question if her love for Michael is really “forever.” As she grows more confused about her conflicting feelings for Theo and Michael, she writes a letter to Michael: “I made promises to you that I’m not sure I can keep” (199). She explains that Michael is not to blame for her confusion, but rather the gradual realization that when Katherine promised Michael “forever,” she was unaware as to what forever truly meant.
As Katherine reflects on her relationship with Michael, she is careful not to insinuate that she never loved Michael and does not try to diminish their relationship even though it has ended. On the contrary, she admits: “I will never be sorry for loving him. That in a way I still do—that maybe I always will” (208). Katherine realizes that even though her relationship with Michael is over, a part of her will always love him. She even concedes that, were the circumstances of their relationship different, they may have ended up together: “Maybe if we were ten years older it would have worked out differently. Maybe. I think it’s just that I’m not ready for forever” (208). Katherine argues here that romantic love can be real and true without it needing to last forever. Katherine can move on from her relationship with Michael without regret, anger, or resentment because she understands that sometimes love does not last. She has made peace with that reality, which allows her to close the chapter on that relationship while honoring its importance to her and how it shapes her perspective on love.
Exploration of Sexual Identity
Forever… argues that there is no one definition of sexual identity. Each of the young characters explores their sexuality throughout the text, indicating that sexuality is a uniquely individual experience and exploration.
At the beginning of the text, Katherine and Erica disagree in their perspectives on sex. While Erica argues that “you don’t need love to have sex,” Katherine feels that “it means more that way” (30). The friends ultimately agree to disagree, respecting one another’s perspectives: “We look at sex differently…I see it as a physical thing and you see it as a way of expressing love” (31). Throughout the text, Erica tries, unsuccessfully, to begin a sexual relationship with Michael’s friend, Artie. As the narrative continues, Erica and Katherine go on separate journeys of sexual exploration and come to different conclusions by the end.
Erica, who originally planned to have sex for the first time before leaving for college just to have the experience, writes a letter to Katherine over the summer: “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and have decided I don’t want to fuck just for the hell of it. I want it to be special, like you and Michael. So I’m going to wait” (184). By exploring her sexuality, Erica decides that she would rather wait to have sex that feels truly meaningful rather than with someone she is attracted to but does not love.
Katherine at first believes that one needs to be in love to have sex: “I can’t imagine what the first time would be like with someone you didn’t love” (107), and this perspective does help her achieve a healthy and productive sexual relationship with Michael. However, as she becomes increasingly sexually confident throughout the text, by the end, she no longer believes that one need be in love to have sex. She has a sexually explicit dream about her coworker, Theo: “I dreamed I was with Theo. It was so real—I could smell him, taste him, feel him—and I wanted him so much. I did things to him that I have only read about” (189).
Artie is an important character in the text because he struggles with his sexual identity, as the novel alludes to Artie possibly being gay. While Artie argues with Erica that he is not gay, nonetheless he has unresolved issues that lead to a suicide attempt. Since the text was written in the 1970s, Artie remains a coded character throughout the text, and the extent of his inner turmoil is never thoroughly explored. Aside from Artie’s struggles with sexual impotence, his interest in acting as a career is perhaps another allusion that he is gay (although a stereotypical one). Artie’s suicide attempt illustrates the potential ramifications of being unable to explore one’s sexual identity to its fullest extent in a society that, at the time of the text’s publication, would have decried being gay as deviant behavior.
The text is explicit in its aim to portray sex, especially first-time sex or having sex with a new partner for the first time, in a realistic manner. Katherine and Michael fumble through their first attempts at sex: Michael often achieves orgasm quickly, leaving Katherine dissatisfied. Even as Katherine and Michael’s sexual relationship becomes more satisfying for both of them, with time and practice, Blume is careful to make explicit that sex is an act that requires communication, patience, and practice for it to be pleasurable for both partners. Katherine reflects on her misunderstandings of sex before she became sexually active: “I used to think if you read enough books you’d automatically know how to do everything the right way. But reading and doing are not the same at all” (112). This misconception leaves Katherine disappointed after their first few attempts at sex: “I’d wanted it to be perfect” (106). It is also a direct message to the narrative’s young adult audience that they should be wary of falling into the same line of thinking.
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