My first girlfriend.
This was in high school. To understand my high school experience, you have to know that my parents split up 10 months before freshman year started. Then my dad died a week before classes began. Then junior year I become sick with an arthritic condition–have to give up all the jock stuff I was doing, and face all my friends who thought I just quit the football team. I could barely walk.
So I’m already struggling, but fall of my senior year I meet Cindy. (Not her real name, which was Katie.) This was through a mutual friend. She went to the other high school in town, and was a year younger.
We were a little too . . . emotionally reckless. We let things go too fast too quickly. We lost our virginity to each other. (If I wasn’t cursed with such a strong sense of propriety IRL, I’d be able to brag that I lost ‘it’ in a waterbed with the mayor’s daughter, which would be completely true.)
I can’t even remember how we split up. Towards the end of my senior year, it turned out that she just got tired of me and started seeing someone else. She denied it, but still dumped me. I could handle the dumping, but the cheating was just an outright rejection of me. Ow.
A week later we went to my prom, because I already bought the tickets. Back then I didn’t think that was all that pathetic. And it was on a boat, so neither of us could leave even though it was obvious within the first three minutes that we were both miserable. She told me she wasn’t seeing this guy, I found out she was lying. The last time I ever saw her, at a party, I threw a beer in her face. (Just the liquid, although to this day I’m disturbed by my actions.)
I’m angry at how that experience shaped me. It was just a silly high-school fling, but it wounded me pretty deeply. I suppose every teenager loves to magnify the daily angst of their life, and I was especially vulnerable because of the traumas I had been going through. My dating life since then showed a distinct history of women unlikely to cheat on me, with low self-esteem and a discomfort towards sex and their bodies. I’m now married, with two kids I love dearly, but their mother certainly fits this pattern, and now I’m left wondering if things couldn’t have been better somehow.