Another reason sex didn’t factor into my coming-of-age years is that I’m a Christian. Not a Bible-thumping, the-world-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket Christian, but a (sexually) conservative, Bible-believing, traditionally raised Minnesota Lutheran girl who was taught that sex is for marriage and that’s that. Heck, the first time I even heard of a blow job was when I threw a party in eighth grade and my mom caught a girl going down on a guy in our basement. She was shockingly cool about it (which is saying something: my mom was the Mom of all Moms; the woman all my friends feared, revered and secretly worshiped) and let the party play out until everyone had gone home. Then all hell broke loose — at least that’s how it seemed to my eighth-grade, never-been-kissed self. She sat me down at the kitchen table, folded her hands, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Let’s talk about oral sex.” I’d thought the birds-and-bees talk was painful; this was torture.
I don’t know whether it was hearing my mom explain the basics of oral sex, the embarrassment of having not previously known about this particular genre or the fact that she caught two of my friends actually engaging in this in my basement, but let’s just say I never fully recovered from that centuries-long five-minute conversation.
Something else that has kept my pants on all these years: Despite my Miss Independent, one-of-the-guys, often cynical/always logical demeanor, I am a hopeless romantic. I believe wholeheartedly that sex and love should coexist. In fact, I believe they need to coexist; that without love, sex is just a Band-Aid fix for something that should be addressed with words rather than walks of shame. What’s more, I’m an obnoxiously picky person who avoids letting go of control, being vulnerable and making mistakes at all costs — a by-the-book Type-A perfectionist. The longer I go without sex, the more build-up there is: the more anxiety and curiosity, fear and desire, anticipation and uncertainty. Basically, what was once just another bit of my identity has, over 26 years, become a defining element of who I am, whether I like it or not.
