When I was 15, I came very close to kissing my first boyfriend.
Ben had told everyone how much he wanted me during the courtship phase. He pursued me with hand-written letters and word-of-mouth compliments. We shared lingering gazes and moonlit trysts (okay, only one). Once I gave in to his advances, however, the relationship skidded to a halt. After failing to solicit the attentions I required for commitment, I sent him a scathing note intended to spur him to action, which instead resulting in us breaking up. He told everyone I was a bitch, and we never spoke again.
In fact, except for eight words, we never spoke at all. The entire six-months or so interaction occurred with a single verbal and no physical interaction.
Such was dating in the controlled environment of the Christian fundamentalist Church I was raised in.
But despite my intimidated leanings towards good-girl conformity, hormones had other plans for me. They punched a hole, one, two, in a bible-box I had hitherto supposed impenetrable. But they didn’t stop at just flailing outside of the box. They thought outside it, too, looking over their collective shoulder as guilty and flushed as could be, even as they marched over and demanded that Ben and I get together. I just held on for dear life as they dashed over to my best friend Ruth, told her to tell Ben’s sister where we’d meet, set up a nod, nod, wink, wink code-system, and shuttled my helpless feet over moonlit potholes and into a crouching position behind a tent.
He actually showed up. We looked quakingly at each other for a moment.
I rose out of my crouch and leaned, as coyly as one can, into the wall of the tent. This didn’t work at all, so I stood up straight. I looked up at him and let the moonlight play with my eyelashes.
"You like me?” I said.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, looking away.
It occured to me that the full moon was actually creating a glare off of my bottle eyeglasses. I subtly shifted position.
“I like you too,” I said.
We stared at each other for a moment, our hearts pounding, lips (well I know mine were), throbbing. And then fear overcame desire, and we split in opposite directions, without another word.
After that, I resigned myself to holding Ben’s gaze over the hundred-foot gap separating the young sister’s section from the young brother’s section, and pressing retrieved butterscotch candy wrappers he’d dropped, between the pages of my Bible.
Three months after the moonlit tryst whose mental replay button still kept me up at nights, I went on a youth trip to the Ottowa fellowship in Canada where Ben lived. He slipped me a note on Sunday afternoon, an hour before my return trip home.
It said, ‘I love you.’
I almost lost my mind on the car-ride home. The sunlight through the car window felt like my lover’s touch. Passing license plates held coded promises of future conjoined initials. The throb of my heart threw me into such dizziness that the Sister driving asked repeatedly if I was OK. No drug since then, not even the most potent, pure aemphetamines available on the west coast, has ever come close to that first burst of pure ecstasy.
And when, two months later, I’d failed to receive another message from him, despite three letters of my own, I sealed my fate with a spicy little ‘how dare you diss me’ page of notebook paper folded in the origami-reminiscent tidiness perfected by adolescent girls and delivered crisply on a designated rock by the west dorm at Victory.
The news came, via the sibling-express, forty-five minutes later.
“He’s mad. He said you’re a bitch.”
And thus concluded my first lesson in the dynamics of male-female companionship. In fact, despite (or perhaps because of) the general absence of interaction, I see now that I had learned everything I’d ever need to know about dating.
I would be happily doing my own thing, when along would come the unexpected and disruptive attentions of a random male.
I would then be, in this order, distracted from my own happy tasks, flattered by the attention, and then, rabidly desirous of more, more, more.
The male would withdraw instinctively, as I would instinctively find a way to get closer.
When I got closer, conducting 7/8’s of all verbal discourse, he’d be induced by my natural charms to give me what I wanted, in this case, an affirmation of undying affection.
Content that he’d pleased me, the male would then withdraw and find other things to do.
I would then flail frantically to regain his attention, it would be too slow in coming, I’d sabatoge it all by freaking out, he’d run in the opposite direction after insulting me for making him feel small.
It would all conclude by both parties feeling slightly stunned, a bit bewildered, and definitely hurt, which would induce us to find an immediate aphrodisiac in the form of a new drama-partner.
Repeat unto death do us part.
In my case, the replacement came in the form of my actual First Kiss, one pot-smoking, beret-wearing, chain-dangling, nunchucks-swinging member of the Portuguese mafia...