how to only pick the first many-to-many record and

My Tables are as follows:

EventTicketSales belongsToMany Approvings via EventTicketSalesApprovings.

Inside EventTicketSalesTable.php I wrote

    $this->belongsToMany('Approvings', [
        'className' => 'Contacts',
        'joinTable' => 'event_ticket_sales_approvings',
        'targetForeignKey' => 'contact_id',
        'saveStrategy' => 'replace',
    ]);

When I do pagination, I write

$contain = [
        'Approvings'
    ];

$sales = $this->paginate($this->EventTicketSales->find()->where($conditions)->join($join)->contain($contain));

Inside the search.ctp, I write

 <?php foreach($eventTicketSales as $eventTicketSale):?>
    <tr>
         <td>
           <?= $eventTicketSale->approvings[0]->company ?>
         </td>
    </tr>

What I would like is

keep the many to many relationships between the contacts table and the event_ticket_sales table as Approvings relation,
but have a way to only query the first Approving only

Why?

The reason is this query I only need to show the first approving contact person in the page and still keep pagination.

and I want the query to be as efficient as I possibly can.

If there is a better way to do this with joins instead of contains, I will be happy to do so.

What defines as first approving contact person?

Suppose we have a event_ticket_sales that have 2 approvings. The one where the id in event_ticket_sales_approvings table is the smallest is the first one. Yes the id is primary integer auto increment.

What are the conditions in the above pagination query?

    $conditions = [
                'OR' => [
                    ['EventTicketSales.invoice_number LIKE' => '%'.$data['search_field'].'%'],
                    ['EventTicketSales.receipt_number LIKE' => '%'.$data['search_field'].'%'],
                    ['ApprovingsContacts.company LIKE'      => '%'.$data['search_field'].'%'],
                ]
            ];

UPDATE

I appreciate that there is a similar question here How to limit contained associations per record/group?

However, I want to state that:

that question is trying to find the Article and its highest scoring Abstract. therefore Article hasMany Abstract and Abstract belongsTo Article
In my case, the EventTicketSales belongsToMany Approvings via EventTicketSalesApprovings. Which is different.

Se my approach for solve similar question:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cake-php/104XcwVG6WI