When I was the first girl in my Christian school to have a boyfriend in 5^th grade, there was an emergency meeting called, “to warn the children about the dangers of dating without the intention of being married. Temptation. Sin. Evil of Secular Thinking.” They said. “You Will Go to Hell.”

But I was in public school now. All my friends had already lost their virginity. I was considered a “prude”, which at a certain point I was proud of. Once you lose it, you can’t get it back! I knew the kind of boys I liked wanted what no one else had, so I could use it as a draw, to my advantage.

He and I started dating and took it further every day. I remember thinking, this is it? I mean, it felt good, but it wasn’t the event that had been hyped up by my church. In the back of my mind I thought about how I was sinning, and that annoyed me. Cause I loved him, and he loved me. I felt my church’s stigma around sex kept a certain level of anxiety in me throughout our otherwise beautiful relationship. And we had sex every day. He was so receptive and reciprocal, we lost our V together, learned with each other, and it was fun.

My mom gave me birth control, but we didn’t talk about that stuff. We didn’t talk about a lot, really. Home life was bad, so I moved out with him. When my little cousin came to visit, he asked where my boyfriend slept in our house. My aunt told him he slept on the couch.

We ended up having a 7-year relationship, and he wanted to marry me, but I knew that I wanted more for my life than just to be a wife and mother. So when I decided to move to Europe and he wouldn’t come with me, and we broke up, it was really heart wrenching. Things felt so wrong. I cried to a stranger in Italy, “He was supposed to be the ONE! How is he not??” His reply was a pivotal moment in my thought process. “Maybe he was the one for you, for that time in your life. And there will be another one for new times. And that’s okay.”

Since then, I have continued to un-indoctrinate myself from all the fear-and-reaction type thinking that was instilled in me so early. In my adult dating life I have come to the conclusion that myself as a person cannot have sex without love, so I cannot be promiscuous, but I don’t judge others for how they choose to experience the learning curve that is life.