1. heads up! this might be triggering for survivors of abusive relationships!
2. don’t expect an update more than once a week.
I almost got married when I was seventeen.
My high school boyfriend was busy picking rings out of a Macy’s catalog with his mother when I told him that I was moving away to ohio and gay. He cried for a couple of hours and I watched and murmured things about ‘it has nothing to do with you’ like a good girlfriend, and then I made him drive me home.
It’s hard to look back and own up to the fact that I spent the kind of time that I did (two years) on an emotionally abusive, futurama watching, tuba-playing misogynist. But it was an important chunk of my adolescence, and it’s important to remember how I got there and why I stayed there so I don’t ever go there again, and, anyways, I am mostly doomed to exploit my bad teenage relationships until being fifteen is no longer inherently pathetically funny.
At fifteen, sixteen, seventeen I had no idea that I was queer. I was devoted in a painful, ever-prostrate way to my boyfriend. I was too busy working through my gag reflex (nice try, biology!) to think about being gay. I wrote poetry, I played music, I was a member of the varsity bowling team. I watched reruns of Beverly Hills, 90210 every afternoon from 4-6. I was obsessed with English literature and internet blogging (how’s it hanging, TeenOpenDiary.com?). I wore sweater sets that my mother bought for me from The Children’s Place. It felt scandalous to stay up past 10pm. I was, as my hairdresser recently pointed out, a square bear. I was oblivious to sexuality, let alone anything of the alternative variety.
Throughout middle school I had prayed for a boyfriend so I would have someone to hold hands with in the halls. In my head it went no further than that. In high school I prayed for the same boyfriend that never appeared in middle school because I was convinced that everyone I knew had moved on from holding hands to having sex and I was clearly standing under a neon sign all day long that blinked “late bloomer”. None of my friends ever actually talked about sex or made mention of their “sex lives” (a phrase we had come to say as often as possible in our conversations), but I was unwavering in my understanding that everyone else was fucking in the streets after school except me, and when they were done they smoked cigarettes and talked about my virginity.
The day after we consummated our relationship I woke up and finally realized that none of my friends had ever had “serious” boyfriends and that I had immediately teleported light years beyond anything any one of them had ever “done”. We were nerds and drips and members of the technology club; we didn’t have sex, but I hadn’t noticed. It was like peer pressure… but without any peers. Or pressure.
I was going to include a few paragraphs about oral sex right here, but some things don’t translate really well into public blog territory, so here’s a summation of three smarmy paragraphs: it made everything better for four minutes, and then it made everything much, much worse.
The first time I told anyone I was gay was when I broke up with the boyfriend. I had just turned 17; I think he was almost 20. We had talked openly about marriage for a long time. No, I have no idea what I was thinking. We planned to get married in our near future; I would go to college in Boston (I had been accepted at Brandeis) and Philip would accompany me. We would live in married student housing. He would become a police officer. I would begin having children as soon as possible. We would be very happy.
About a year into our, er, courtship, though, I very slowly began to understand that what was going on in my relationship amounted to what we in service provide language generally refer to as “fucked up shit”. He threatened to kill himself if I ever broke up with him a few times a week. He got angry whenever I spent time with my friends. He isolated me from my parents and fought with me for hours whenever I told him about a family vacation I was going on or a night I was going to spend with my grandparents. He counted the number of orgasms we had so we would know how many I “owed” him.
It got worse. I felt like I was living on another planet, I was so isolated (it was like dating scientology). I knew I was involved with someone who was controlling me, who was dangerous and desperate. At sixteen it felt like there was no way to get out of it unless I went far away to college. I made plans to graduate high school a year early. I was praised and admired for my academic drive and ‘internal motivation’. I really needed to get away and couldn’t figure another way out.
When my boyfriend informed me of his plan to come with me to college in Boston, I did two things; I prepared an application for a school very far away from home (Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio), and I brainstormed excuses for getting out. I thought about telling him that the rare disorder my sister had as a child had reappeared and I had to break up with him to take care of her. My family was moving? I wasn’t allowed to date anyone anymore?
And then it dawned on me; the granddaddy of lies: I’m gay.
I knew it would work. He couldn’t argue with it. He couldn’t change it. He couldn’t work around it. He wouldn’t tell anyone because he would be so embarassed, both for him and for me. He wouldn’t follow me to college. I was pretty sure it would keep him non-violent, and I was pretty sure that it would crush him.
In my head I knew it wasn’t exactly a lie. It felt like I was lying to him when I told him; it was an excuse that I made up, and I neither felt nor identified as gay, but I knew something wasn’t entirely false. It was a lie, though I remember thinking it might not be a lie for very long (and wondering where that thought emerged from). It was like I knew eventually that I’d figure myself out (in favor of the gay), even though I had never given it much thought. I knew he wouldn’t tell anyone, but I wasn’t wholly concerned if he did.
We broke up in June, a few days after my high school graduation; I told him I had been accepted off of the waitlist to Oberlin and that I would be going there and that I was gay and he shouldn’t follow me. I spent one afternoon with him in early July during which he picked me up in his car and wouldn’t let me go home for four hours until I promised to always love him and care about his feelings. After that I decided I would never see him again; I left shortly thereafter.
I realized that I hadn’t been lying on the second (yep, the second) day of college, when I saw a poster advertising the queer students’ union meeting and realized I was moderately interested in going. “Oh”, I thought, “that’s me”. And that was that; it was a great rush of understanding and relief as I stared at a poster on the wall of my new dormitory. I fretted about going for a few minutes, made up my mind, and there I was. I was not a liar. I was free.
