When I was nine, I had my first boyfriend. Hanging out in his dad’s man cave, Michelle dared me to kiss him on the cheek. I went for it, forgetting I was wearing a baseball cap until it hit him in the side of the head before my lips made it to his cheek. With that awkward but successful kiss, Michelle said that we should “go out” with each other and he and I agreed. I spent the evening holding in my absolute elation that I, of all girls, was a girl with a boyfriend. I had been chosen. The next morning at school, squishing our boots in the slush, waiting for the bell to ring, he said that yesterday was just a stupid dare and we should just take it back. I agreed, to save face, then cried later at home.
Mom’s rules made it clear; girls were for friends, boys were for… something else. I was told, but not told why, that I had to leave the door open when I had a boy friend over to play. I didn’t even know what we could do behind a door that wouldn’t happen with the door open, but it was clear; being alone with a boy was wrong, maybe even dangerous.
I was unsure why playing with my neighbor Derek should have different rules than playing with Emma from down the street. Aside from what was rumored to be in their pants, I didn’t know what made boys so different. Girls and boys didn’t play together at recess; the girls did girl things and the boys did boy things. When we did start to blend our recreation time, we started making them our boyfriends. We still didn’t know what they were for, but we knew that’s what girls did. That’s what the teenage girls in the movies we watched did. They had boyfriends.
When I was 13, I had my first boyfriend. After being friends all school year and going to the grade eight grad dance together, we made it official. We walked around town holding hands, swam in the creek, biked through the forest trails, and hung out with our friends. After I got back from three weeks’ camping with my family, I heard that he had been hanging out with my friend Kaitlyn while I was gone. At his birthday party at the end of the summer, I refused to have my first kiss be in a game of truth or dare with his friends watching. I sent him an angry email; he broke up with me and started going out with Kaitlyn.
In high school, I liked boys, but I was also afraid of boys. I knew boys weren’t for friends. They wanted something else. I couldn’t look them in the eye, scared that any contact with them was inherently romantic and sexual. While magazines were telling me which lip gloss to wear to ask out a boy, Law & Order: SVU was telling me not to walk home alone at night, lest a man jump out of a bush and rape me. College movies were telling me to watch my red Solo cup at parties lest it be roofied, making me the victim of date rape. At school, we were discussing which boys were the cutest. On the street, we ran away from men who cat-called us from cars.
Be attracted to boys, but stay away from boys. I was supposed to be excited when a boy asked me out, but be cautious of what he might do when we were alone. Boys were pigs who only wanted sex, but I should give that nice guy a chance. I should be grateful for attention from boys, but still not give them what they want. I couldn’t figure out, I still can’t, how to act around these people that I’m expected to be both attracted to and afraid of.
When I was 18, I had my first boyfriend. We were both in first year of film production at college. I thought he was hot in a weird way and looked cool in a leather jacket. I didn’t scare him off when I told him over MSN Messenger about being too depressed to come to class. He slid his desk right next to mine in the classroom, put his arm around me when we all hung out in the student lounge, and when I came inside from a film shoot out in the freezing Thunder Bay winter, he would rub his hands together quickly to create heat and then put them over my hands. We looked like we were praying to Final Cut Pro. When we kissed for the first time, as the credits of Donnie Darko scrolled on my TV, he asked if it was my first kiss. When I embarrassingly asked if he could tell, he said I could try a little harder.
It seems so obvious in hindsight. In high school, I never dated a boy, took The Craft very seriously, listened to Ani Difranco a lot, and watched every lesbian movie I could find (because I related to the feeling of being an outsider, I thought). But as long as I (thought I) liked boys, I couldn’t be a lesbian. I didn’t look like, or feel attracted to, the lesbians I had seen, so I wrote off my feelings as “girl crushes”.
The first time I masturbated, I was thinking about a female singer with big lips. Well, that confirmed it. I was sexually attracted to women. From there, the deliberation began; was it only women, or also women? Was I lesbian or bisexual? Was my attraction to men just hard to let go of because of years of heteronormative media only giving me examples of women in romantic relationships with men? With no cute lesbian couples, fictional or real, as examples, cutting out men felt like cutting out the possibility of romance. I wondered if I wanted both (romance and sex) from both (men and women), or just one from each. Could I want different things from different genders?
When I was 27, I had my first boyfriend. We met on Tinder, but didn’t meet in person for six weeks. We fell fast and hard, confessing feelings over long text conversations, making big promises, and bickering in an adorable way you love to watch in rom-coms. He said he’d leave the company that kept him away, after one more job. He said he’d take me to his favorite city, Vancouver. He said he’d take me to TIFF. He said he’d build us a house by a lake. He said he’d come back home in December. Then February. Then someday. Over a year since we’d seen each other in person, I finally provoked a definitive answer. “I’m staying in Calgary.” “I love you so much you asshole.”
Three months was the amount of time that I thought I’d need from the start of a relationship to being ready to have sex with someone. I knew I needed emotional intimacy before physical intimacy. But I also assumed that I’d never get to three months with anyone because everyone wanted sex more than I did, especially men. I assumed no one would stick around with me for that long without gettin’ some. I thought I was unlovable because I didn’t love like others did.
A long-distance relationship seemed to be the perfect way to begin a relationship for me. Within a few months, we were head over heels and I was sure that when he returned to my city and stayed, that we could carry on the relationship where most people are by that point- in love and having sex. But he never came back, so I had to reconsider what I wanted. Was I still interested in finding a partner to live the life I’d wanted to have with him (including sex), or was that imagined future just part of the illusion of falling “in love”?
It’s taken decades to unravel the effects that compulsory heterosexuality has had on me, and now another story we were told is coming undone for me as well. Romantic attraction and sexual attraction are not only separate, but both are optional. To me, sex seems unnecessary, romantic monogamy sounds limiting, and men? Still wondering what they’re even for.