I had my first serious boyfriend when I was fifteen. I was living in Hawaii and met Andrew at a friend’s birthday party. He was a cute surfer who called me “ma’am,” which I found insanely adorable. He was two years older than me, didn’t take school seriously, and didn’t really know what he wanted to do in the future. At the time I gave him a free pass on that one. I mean, we were teenagers, right? He was careless and reckless and impulsive—a free spirit, I thought. I’d happily do his homework whenever he asked me to “help,” I’d write his essays when he insisted he had writer’s block, and I’d cook him meals despite the fact that I hated cooking. It’s easy to be a free spirit when someone else is doing everything for you for free, I guess. But being in love can turn you into an idiot, so I guess that made two of us.
Now, at fifteen your hormones are raging. I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted dry-humping him on the bench in front of our house. I could’ve taken a college course in that time. I could’ve read a dozen books. Instead, we dry-humped for about a year and a half and I ended up giving him my virginity for his birthday.
We were at his house in his bedroom. We weren’t even alone. His family was home, but at this point we’d been dating long enough that they didn’t care to check in on us. I remember thinking that this would be a huge moment. I wasn’t going to be a virgin anymore. I was officially crossing the threshold of adulthood. I was going to be a woman.
I was nervous but, thanks to the Internet, I’d seen penises before. So no surprise there. When I was thirteen and we had dial-up, I’d look at porn and cringe with horror. Penises were so scary. They reminded me of the monsters from Tremors. They were veiny and weird and looked like faceless girthy men swaying back and forth. Even Andrew’s penis freaked me out sometimes. I would hold it and it would be so warm. And he could make it twitch, which he often did because he liked my startled reaction.
But on the day I lost my virginity, I wasn’t thinking about Tremors. Andrew slipped a condom on and laid me down on his bed. He kissed me and said he loved me and then I felt a rip. I’d read that some women liked it their first time, and that if you were a horseback rider chances were high that you’d already ripped your hymen open. I figured I’d done so many high kicks in martial arts that I’d probably gotten rid of mine a long time ago too. Nope.
It was so uncomfortable. It felt wrong, like he wasn’t supposed to be there. The latex on the condom felt weird and Andrew’s body on mine made it hard to breathe. It hurt so badly that we had to stop after a few minutes. I remember thinking that if just a penis could cause that much pain, I never even wanted to think about pushing a baby out of there. Forget that shit.
Luckily we’d had the foresight to lay down a towel, because there was a bit of blood. As Andrew cleaned it up, I sat there feeling nothing. I didn’t feel like a woman at all. I didn’t feel liberated or sexy. If anything, I felt like a kid who had made a horrible mistake. It wasn’t the romantic moment that I saw in movies. It felt more like the porn I had seen on the Internet: rough and fake and filled with bodily fluids. Overall, it was disappointing. But I was happy that I’d shared my first time with someone I loved.
The second time we did it I felt a little better. By the fifth or sixth time, I genuinely enjoyed and looked forward to having sex. Though there were a few times I thought I’d climaxed, I definitely didn’t. And I wouldn’t for years, until I discovered clitoral stimulation toys. (But that’s another book.)
Andrew and I would waste a lot of time watching TV, going to the beach, and playing videogames. But most of our time was spent thinking about, having, and looking for places to have sex. (Fun fact: Hawaii is known for having the highest pregnancy rate among teenagers. That’s right. It’s such a small island, you have nothing to do but each other.)
There was a girl in my high school—we’ll call her Arlene—who got pregnant twice. I saw her binge-drinking on the steps outside of school, and when I asked her why, she said it was “pregnancy control.” It took me a few years to realize that she was trying to give herself a miscarriage. She got pregnant again her sophomore year, and her mom took her out of school for a few days, probably because she’d caught on to Arlene’s form of “pregnancy control.” She finally had a kid her senior year, and though I was living in California by this point, a friend told me it was because Arlene just knew “it was time.” Seriously. And this wasn’t uncommon. If I had to guess how many pregnant girls there were in my Hawaii high school, I’d say it was in the double digits.
Sidebar to the governmental powers who may be reading this: PLEASE make it mandatory to teach contraception, not abstinence, in high school sex ed classes. Don’t you remember what it was like to be a teenager with throbbing genitals? Don’t you remember how determined you were to find a suitable location for sex? Give teens condoms and the pill, not a lecture. Your words are falling on hot and bothered ears.
I think I knew Andrew and I were doomed a little over a year into the relationship. Andrew had a shiny red sports car that he’d just gotten for his birthday. It was used but looked cool. On this particular day, we were headed off to the beach. As my dad saw us off, he told Andrew to make sure to buckle up. He repeated it a few times and with grave sincerity. I thought this was super weird and rolled my eyes accordingly.
As we drove down the highway, I noticed Andrew’s seatbelt wasn’t buckled.
“Buckle up, babe,” I told him.
“Nah.”
I stared at him. “My dad told you to buckle up.”
He shook his head. “Nothing’s gonna happen.”
“It’ll take you like, what? Two seconds? My dad was all weird about it, so just do it.”
Andrew looked at me. “Nothing’s gonna—”
Of course, since the universe works in mysterious ways, he hit a car. His head flew into the windshield so hard he cracked the glass. His hand smashed into the dashboard and the skin split. His front bumper was dented and damaged.
I got whiplash, but it could’ve been worse. I was wearing my seatbelt.
Andrew was thankfully okay, but unfortunately, the insurance situation was not. Because he rear-ended someone, the fault was on him. His insurance only covered the other vehicle, not his own. The insurance investigators suspected he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, and insisted this negligence meant they were not obligated to pay the medical bills he had accumulated for his head injury.
Since I was the only witness to the accident, Andrew begged me to sign a statement that said he had been wearing his seatbelt and that it must have somehow malfunctioned and released him upon impact, thus explaining the giant crack in the windshield and the giant crack in his head. He asked me to lie.
There was a lot that I would do for Andrew, a lot I had done. I’d do his homework. I’d clean his room. I’d fill his car with gas. I’d cook for him. I’d give him my love, my time, my body. I was in love, and like I said, love makes you a bumbling idiot.
But there was no way in hell I was going to lie on an official document when we’d argued about a seatbelt for two minutes and he’d said, “Nah.”
All he’d had to do was listen. None of this would have happened if he’d listened to me or my dad. And not only had he refused, he asked me to lie. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. He had put his life in danger. For what? To look cool or something? He certainly didn’t look cool with the stitches on his forehead.
I put my foot down: I would not sign. Though he pleaded and fought with me about it, I didn’t budge. He’d broken the law. He’d have to live with his mistakes.
I’m proud of this rare early moment of self-respect I displayed in my first relationship. It established where I wasn’t willing to go. I knew it was unfair of him to ask me to deceive anyone on his behalf, especially when he had no one to blame but himself. My gut told me what the right thing to do was, and I listened.
Eventually he got over it. And then I got over him.