The dance was in the school auditorium and the cover group playing was easy to hear in the basement immediately underneath.  Her name was L—– and she was an attractive and well-blossomed 13 year-old.  I was a year older and one grade in front of her.  Except for the dim glow of an outside security light through a window it was dark there in the storage room where we were making out.  Boy, were we!  There were rumors L. was pretty wild and still virginal me was finding that out first hand.  Admittedly I was essentially male hormones on legs at that moment, but when she moved to unzip my pants I pushed her hands away.  After pushing them away several times, I said “I can’t do this”.  L. was angry and mocked my unwillingness with profanity.  I raised my voice to say “stop it” and she stormed out of the room.  We were never together again. 

I was comfortable in my early/mid teens being on first or second base with a girl but not moving beyond that.  Having seen way too much at too young of an age, I had this notion I was going to “save myself” and not be like my parents.  During the less than 8 years my Mother and Father were married they were not faithful to each other and even as children we knew it.  Sex seemed to be a good bit of what their lives revolved around.  For me there was a youthful belief I was going to be different. 

Soon after getting my driver’s license, I asked K— out who I had a crush on.  We went to a movie, the Diary Queen and she suggested parking afterwards.  After a short while making out in my VW Beetle it blew my mind on our first date when she took her top off.  I found her haste to be naked a huge turn off.  After a bit of her pouting and coldly asking “what is wrong with you” I started the car and took her home.  Afterwards we hardly spoke to one another at school.  On one hand there was a feeling of doing right for myself, but also plenty of confusion.  Was there something wrong with me? 

The first girl I fell truly in love with was a year older than me.  I was a junior and E—– was a senior at another high school six miles away from my school.  To have an older girlfriend who went to a different school was a big deal.  We were an item for over a year and went together to each other’s proms.  I was in the audience when she graduated.  We daydreamed sometimes about a possible life together after we finished college.  

It was a June evening less than a month from my 17th birthday when E. took me riding around in her mother’s car. Only in hindsight would I much later comprehend what she had in mind that night.  Once the sun was almost down she turned onto a little traveled dirt road calling it a “shortcut” back to town.  Before long E. parked the car and said “let’s get in the back”.  We steamed up the back glass even with the windows partially open, but nothing but kissing and petting happened.  She wanted more, but I never let things go there.  Silly me imagined we’d do those things one day when we were married and she would be proud of me for being strong and saving myself until then.  Driving back into town, not much was said.  Things had changed.  I just did not know it yet.     

I had a part-time job in a town 40 miles away from home.  To get there I drove through the town where E. lived and each night on my way home I would drive by her house.  It made me feel chivalrous and close to her.  At least it did until the night I was driving by and saw her kissing a guy by his car in her driveway.  I went home with a broken heart.  Later she somehow convinced me her parents had put pressure on her to see others and she gave into their feeling we were getting too serious.  They were probably right, but we continued on and off for a few months even after she left for college.  Those days what was special inside me was mostly gone, but it still hurt badly when we stopped seeing each other.  

About eight months later after having moved 200 miles to live with my Father for my senior year of high school I met D—–.  She was 16 and I was 17 when I fell for her and for a time, her for me.  We were each other’s “first”.  An engagement ring on her finger said we planned to get married once she was eighteen and out of high school although we were way too young to know what we were doing.  Being youthfully blind there was no doubt within that D. was the “one” until just before her 18th birthday she informed me she wanted to see other guys.  I later found there had been others while we were together.  I was shattered and ended up moving a thousand miles westward as I tried to run away from the heartache I thought she caused me.

I changed soon after.  The environment I grew up in caught up with me completely.  A clear conclusion was reached within.  Then and there I decided women used men just the same as they accused men of using women.  I consciously chose to be what I perceived everyone else was.   I just did not know any better.  All that was going on in my life was a more or less normal passage into adulthood.  The problem was I was not normal.  

In hindsight my response was predictable.  No adult ever talked to me about love, sex and relationships.  There were no examples of healthy adult relationships close around me growing up.  Within one personal choice made late in my 18th year I became what I viewed everyone else was to be and dysfunctional ways took over.  Until then I had been faithful to my girlfriends and did my best to be the “white knight” gentleman to each one of them.  That suddenly changed.

Eventually I ended up regretting the direction I chose, but it took decades.  Allowing youthful perception to so darkly color life my life brought dysfunction to every love relationship that followed.  Ignorance is often not bliss.  Lack of knowledge can be emotionally dangerous.  Being blindly dysfunction is corrosive and damaging. 

Today I am grateful to have clear hindsight into where my wayward path began.  Sometimes understanding can only come once one locates the root of behavior.  That insight combined with some therapy and a lengthy period of introspection, meditation and celibacy has helped me to feel fresh, new and reborn.  For that I am deeply grateful.     

Sometimes I wish I were a little kid again, skinned knees are easier to fix than broken hearts.  Unknown