I had no sexual filter, no sexual context, no sexual education, no sexual role models.
All I had was a deep desire for my first real boyfriend. To my 18-year-old mind, it was a long overdue rite of passage. I was supposed to have a boyfriend. Something was clearly wrong with me that I'd never had one.
I'd been devastated when Valentine's Day had come and gone with no sweetheart to sweeten it up.
I'd confided my feelings to one of my new, few college friends: an equally rare low-income black girl with the smarts to get into Yale – and the unmitigated gall to accept the acceptance letter. She was quirky, quiet, slow-moving ... and deep. Deeply intelligent, but without the type-A competitive fire that animated me and most of our classmates.
Deep had chuckled at my angst. "Maybe you need to stop being in love with love."
Huh?
Of course I was in love with love.
I had a perfect Catholic idea that I would find The Boyfriend who would quickly become The Husband, and together we'd spit out 2-7 kids. On our 50th wedding anniversary, we'd toddle down the main aisle during mass to celebrate our living embodiment of the Sacrament of Marriage.
This dream was absolutely, positively inconsistent with the reality that transpired.
In a desperate, lonely attempt to make friends and fit in, I'd joined the Yale Gospel Choir on its spring-break bus tour. A few days in, I ended up sharing a seat with Med School.
Med School was 8-10 years older than me. A nice guy. From Michigan. Average attractiveness. A future anesthesiologist who'd chosen anesthesiology as his specialty because it paid well enough to offset the gazillions of dollars he now owed in student loans.
My looking-for-my-first-boyfriend mind calculated, "He's nice, he'd probably treat you right, and wow – he's even a doctor."
To my surprise, and probably his, I grabbed his hand underneath the blanket that covered us.
Holding hands gradually led to him stroking my fingers and my wrists. Then stroking my breasts over my sweatshirt, then gradually and tentatively, stroking me under my sweatshirt and over my bra, then inside my bra. Not to mention stroking the Down South place over my jeans.
A soon-to-become-familiar sexual tug-of-war played in my head.
I deserve to be touched. I shouldn't feel guilty. I'm not doing anything wrong.
Followed by:
What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Why do you seem to have a thing for older men whom you don't find physically attractive?
That night, Daddy visited me in a nightmare yelling, "Sin, sin, sin!"
What bothered me was that I didn't know Med School very well and I didn't feel a strong attachment to him, yet I had willingly engaged in a purely physical encounter.
It was time #3. My first sexual experimentation had been with 40-something Johnnie Walker when I was 16. Shortly thereafter, I'd shared my newfound familiarity with oral sex with one of my childhood friends, after dark in a local park. After those two experiences, I'd sworn that the next man who touched my body would be someone I was either madly in love or in lust with.
Med School didn't fall into either category, so I felt a guilty sensation of eww and ick that caused me to self-consciously avoid him for the rest of the tour and the rest of the semester.
