Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  Kara’s boyfriend was Jared Gamble, and it was a high feminist crime for her to date him, because Jared Gamble was the boy Nellie had a crush on. Sara was the second of us to get a boyfriend; she also dated Jared Gamble. This, of course, was after Kara broke up with Jared because, she said, she felt bad for making Nellie feel bad. Those days were an emotional minefield: there were five girls in the group, and we all had terrible things to say about one another, privately, in coded notes and whispered tones at agreed-upon times in the girls’ bathroom. Then Nellie got a boyfriend, and after that Kara got another boyfriend. Would I ever get a boyfriend? I didn’t know. Probably not.

  That was the story I told myself, at least. My mom told me not to worry and that eventually I would find someone to marry. (That’s how she framed it: “someone to marry.”) And eventually, finally, I did find someone I felt was worthy. His name was Eli.

  I met him at an audition for a teen theater collective; he was wearing a leopard-print collared bowling shirt, and I had recently dyed my hair fuchsia. (I remember asking the casting director if I would be allowed to keep my hair that color, to which he replied, “Oh, yeah; we want you guys to look like teens.”) We flirted (although I didn’t know then that I was flirting; I knew only that I was attracted to this boy and was intentionally finding myself next to him in group exercises) and exchanged AOL Instant Messenger screen names. We chatted online every night for a week during my allocated hour of computer time, and then he invited me to see Shrek at the downtown movie theater. When he kissed me (on the lips!) under the Burnside Bridge, I actively wished I could stop time. My dreams were coming true.

  I knew I would be a perfect girlfriend. I had seen enough formulaic evening television to understand that women should be honest and funny and like pizza; they should peddle surprise tickets to basketball games and be good at baking; they should love dogs, laugh at jokes, and bravely hold back tears as often as possible. I daydreamed about being a girlfriend and wrote about being a girlfriend and talked to my friends about how much I wanted to be a girlfriend, so when I finally became someone’s girlfriend, I knew not to complain about anything that misaligned. A good girlfriend—one who stayed in her place and didn’t complain—would become a good wife. A few weeks after my mom met Eli, she told me that he, just like Kent Jackson had been at age seven, was “marriage material,” which was just the incentive I needed to throw everything I had into the relationship.

  Some things were going to have to change, though. Before I met Eli, I spent a lot of time with my friends—especially my friend Jessica. Before Eli, she came to my house every morning at 7:00 a.m. and we made toast from the huge loaf of artisan bread my mom always kept around. When it snowed and school was canceled, we slid down the icy hill on our binders and tried on my dad’s slippers and made a stop-motion video about an oversized cookie. Every day after school, Jessica came over and we watched The Kids in the Hall and ate the good chips from the grocery store, sometimes dipped in mustard. We went to school dances with each other; we ordered $3 breadsticks from the pizzeria; we had sleepovers every weekend and slept on the pullout sofa bed together, staying up as late as we could to try to catch Saturday Night Live.

  I didn’t know it then, but more than all the romantic comedies I watched and women’s magazines I read, being friends with Jessica prepared me for the role of excellent girlfriend.

  In 1994, a pair of psychologists named Phillip Shaver and Cindy Hazan proposed that romantic relationships were essentially emotional “attachments” not dissimilar to those between parents and their children.1 In 2002, Wyndol Furman extended the theory to suggest that friendships might be related to romantic relationships as well. In his research, he found that “these links were more consistent than those between parent-child relationships and romantic relationships.”2 Simply put, this means that friendships and romantic relationships aren’t all that different—and that’s science.

  But I didn’t know that in high school. In my mind, friends were merely placeholders on the path to a boyfriend; as soon as there was a boy to canoodle with, my friends would (obviously) take the bench. Being an excellent girlfriend (which I was) required a lot of time and energy, and this was hard for Jessica to understand. I had to spend my weekend days with Eli now, and I had to call him every night at 8:00 or he might doubt my loyalty. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be Jessica’s friend anymore; it was just that Eli had to be the most important thing in my life, and everything else would have to come after. I hated that she couldn’t understand this; in fact, despite the fact that I went out of my way to spend what little free time I had with her, she seemed annoyed with me.

  The solution was, obviously, that Jessica should get a boyfriend. This was actually my mom’s idea; she said it would be fun for us to all go on double dates together, and Jessica would feel less left out. Lucky for Jessica, there was an excellent candidate in our fourth-period English class: Ben Stevens. Ben Stevens was sort of a fixer-upper—he wore pale khakis with pleats and socks with his sandals, and he was always quoting The Simpsons when it wasn’t really appropriate—but he had a lot of potential. His hair was cake-frosting pink, and he played the cello in the after-school orchestra, which indicated an ability to commit. Also, he was very intelligent, and his friend group sat in the stairwell during lunch listening to liberal talk shows on a chunky FM radio with a long antenna. Most important, it was very obvious to me and to everyone in fourth-period English that Ben had a massive crush on Jessica. One day, just to confirm it, I passed Ben a note that said, “Do you like Jessica?” Ben wrote back, in the most careful, darkest writing, “I think she has the most beautiful hands.”

  Setting Ben and Jessica up was not as easy as it should have been. While I was sure I could coerce Ben into a casual dating situation, Jessica was harder to persuade. I talked her into one date. It went poorly.

  Ben tried to kiss Jessica; she accommodated with the closed-mouth kind of thing you do with your grandmother; and that was the end of their relationship.

  When she broke up with him the next day over the phone, Ben’s world imploded. He was shocked to the brink of depression.

  I was on Team Ben. Jessica’s mother had clearly not taught her the importance of being a good girlfriend or landing a marriage-material man early on. When I spent time with Ben, after all, we could talk for hours. He had such interesting thoughts about the world—for instance, he secretly liked Christina Aguilera, but not Britney Spears; he thought Radiohead was biblical; he lost hours meticulously polishing catalogs of his “top ten” this or that—“Top Ten Albums from the Sixties,” “Top Ten Movies with a Female Lead,” “Top Ten Best Shows on VH1.” Ben read books. He knew historical facts without having to look them up. My own boyfriend found historical facts uninteresting, and felt personally affronted that he was forced to read To Kill a Mockingbird at school. How could Jessica not see what a great guy Ben was?

  Since I was partially responsible for causing innocent Ben’s unnecessary suffering, I spared some of my own time to spend with him. It was the least I could do. We scheduled walks together on the waterfront every Wednesday after school. I lied to Eli and Jessica, saying that I had school newspaper duties on Wednesday afternoons, because it would be too painful for both of them to know the truth. I wished I had more time, but reality was bleak.

  One day the weather caved in on our Wednesday plan. Sometimes the rain in Portland is faint, and you can treat it like a friend who’s tagging along; sometimes, though, the rain is tyrannical. This day brought on the latter type. Ben suggested we go to his house and watch Back to the Future, which I had never seen—apparently a bordering-on-criminal offense. The rain assaulted his windows and clamored unrelentingly, but his parents’ house had heated floors and hallways that smelled like vanilla-and-pine cleaner. Before the movie started, we engaged in the activity central to our friendship: Ben complained about how unfair and cruel Jessica had been, and I sympathetically agreed.

  “I mean, she never even kissed me;
not really,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. “So you’ve never been kissed?”

  “Not really.”

  There was only one thing to do.

  Ben’s lips were smaller than Eli’s, or maybe it was just the way he pressed so hard with them; and his nose kept scraping my cheek like the beak of a bird. At first this was exciting; then it was wrong; then I forgot it was wrong. After it was over, I made up justifications: I had to do this for Ben. Ben was my friend. I was just helping him get kissed; without me, he’d never have been kissed. Now I could go back to my boyfriend and pretend nothing had ever happened, and no one would be worse off for it.

  On television at this time there was a show called Boy Meets World, which followed a kid named Cory as he awkwardly navigated young adulthood. Doing the right thing was hard for Cory; he thought school was lame and boring, his best friend lived in a trailer park, and he sometimes got teased because of his “Brillo Pad” hair. Through each season, even as Cory matriculated from high school to college, his teacher (Mr. Feeny) stayed the same, his best friend (Shawn) stayed the same, and his girlfriend (Topanga) stayed the same. The actress who played his sister inexplicably changed in 1996, but otherwise, Cory enjoyed practically mythological constancy.

  Boy Meets World was my favorite show; I never missed an episode. My favorite subplot was the saga of Cory and Topanga, the most perfect couple imaginable. There is a whole episode in season seven devoted entirely to romantic flashbacks concerning their courtship from previous seasons. Topanga (whose name was, after all, Topanga) had wild hair and quirky eccentricities. In sixth grade, while working on a class project with Cory, she danced around his kitchen like a reed in the wind and drew a waxy red heart on her face with a tube of lipstick. Years later, Cory tells Shawn that this was the moment he fell in love with Topanga: at eleven, he knew what he wanted in a woman.

  Cory and Topanga break up once in season four, because Cory kisses a flirtatious girl on a ski trip. Without each other, Topanga and Cory are virtually immobilized. They mope around in separate worlds, wishing to be together again. Luckily, Topanga kisses someone else, too (a hot intellectual from her past, while visiting a Van Gogh exhibit at the local museum); and, as we all know, a kiss from another man is all that’s needed to remind a woman that she is not with her soul mate. Cory and Topanga get back together, go to college together (although Topanga also gets into Yale, nothing is ultimately more important than staying with her man), never have sex, and then get married in season seven.

  Eli called me his “Topanga,” and we decided, largely because of Boy Meets World (and, uh, my mom), to wait until we were married to have sex. My boyfriend’s willingness to model our relationship after one on a television program indicated to me that I had done everything right. There were nights I couldn’t sleep because my interests (antique books and newspaper design) did not align with my boyfriend’s interests (video games and the Muppets). Then I thought about how Cory (who was into baseball and water guns) and Topanga (who followed all the rules and read every book) actually had very little in common, but they still managed to make it work. When you found your soul mate, you made it work.

  But here was the problem: when I kissed Ben, it was not like when Topanga kissed the boy at the museum. For her, the kiss was a hollow dish; it contained nothing. For me, the kiss was sloppy and awkward and magical. I couldn’t think about anything else, and I kept spending time with Ben, who made me mix CDs full of longing acoustic ballads and brought extra pumpkin bread to school to share with me.

  The most recent data3 on the subject says that roughly one in five heterosexual Americans has been unfaithful in a relationship. It’s more common for men than it is for women, although gender isn’t the only factor. The research on the subject is so extensive that it’s almost strange:

  • You’re more likely to cheat with an old flame if you’re a woman4

  • You’re more likely to cheat when your age ends in the number nine if you’re a man5

  • You’re more likely to cheat, regardless of gender, if you’re sexually adventurous

  • You’re more likely to cheat if you have sexual anxiety (or fear that you’ll be unable to perform in bed)6

  Was this “cheating”? I wasn’t sure. To this day I have never sexually cheated on a partner, but I’ve done a fair amount of secret kissing. In fact, if kissing counts, I cheated on most of my boyfriends. Every time, I went back and forth between trying to justify my actions (“I had to kiss him! He was depressed and he needed my lips to touch his lips”) and drowning in utter self-loathing (“What is wrong with me? I’m the worst person who’s ever lived; I’m a waste of air and space”). My mom told me that you should never tell anyone if you cheat on them. Admitting that you cheated “only serves to make you feel better” and doesn’t do anything for the other person at all. Keeping the secret of cheating to yourself, my mom said, is one of the sacrifices you must commonly make in a relationship. You live with your private shame and all the lonely pain that comes with it. My mom’s thinking, of course, has an implication: you cheat not because something is wrong with the relationship but because something is wrong with you.

  I never told Eli I cheated. I never told anyone I cheated. When I finally broke up with Eli a full month after the adulterous kiss (I did it over the phone without really offering an explanation; he started to cry, and I hung up abruptly), the humiliation of my failure haunted me. I was unable to sleep or eat or make it through school without a meltdown, because I’d ripped up the pristine plotline of my future. I was Topanga! Eli was Cory! WHAT HAD I DONE?! (Side note: I recently binge-watched the Disney Channel reboot of Boy Meets World, called Girl Meets World—a show about Cory and Topanga’s daughter, Riley. There’s a scene in the eighth episode in which Topanga says [to her five-year-old son], “I wonder how many people the idea of Cory and Topanga has ruined.” I literally shouted at my laptop, “AT LEAST ONE, TOPANGA! AT LEAST ONE!”)

  So my first relationship was over, and now I had a new one, with Ben. I was not a good girlfriend to Ben. I resented him for forcing me to fall in love with him, and for confirming that I was capable of such epic failure. I screamed at Ben in the living room because he couldn’t understand my sadness. I yelled things like, “JUST GO AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!” Then Ben would quietly, respectfully, leave. His leaving infuriated me. I punished him by intentionally getting into fights with him, and then making him pay for dinner.

  Ben was a great boyfriend, though. His parents were the most functional adults alive. They had been in the Peace Corps and took me to the Unitarian Church with them, and on college visits to see campuses in Washington State. Once we went on a family hiking trip to Mount Rainier, where they had a cabin. Ben even had his own car (a very big deal in high school): it was a white Geo Prizm with a CD player in the console. Every Friday he drove me to see a movie at the suburban Megaplex by the train tracks, and afterward we went to the twenty-four-hour pie shop and played cards. (I had this poker deck with a nude woman on every card that I thought was very exciting to take out in public.)

  My mom liked Ben, too, and told me he was marriage material before she even knew we were dating. Since she approved, and since Ben had a Geo Prizm, I decided that I would have sex with Ben—on my seventeenth birthday. The sex had been predetermined over myriad phone conversations about the logistics of losing our virginity. We had been dating for four months, and we knew we were going to get married someday (that was very important, even though we were Unitarians and Unitarians don’t give a damn about when you have sex, just as long as you’re “safe” and “emotionally ready”). Ben bought condoms—the expensive kind, because condoms are always breaking in after-school specials and sex-education textbooks. We practiced putting a condom on a banana to make sure we knew how to do it.

  For my birthday, I asked my parents to take me to Azteca—a Mexican restaurant that was a little ways down the highway. There were dozens of Mexican restaurants that were closer to our house,
but when we were younger, my sister Alexis and I always chose Azteca for birthday celebrations because of the free fried ice cream and sombrero. We hadn’t been there in years because the whole thing had started to feel very little-kid-ish, and we’d begun picking more grown-up restaurants, like the Indian place downtown with the silk tablecloths.

  I couldn’t eat because I knew I was going to have sex in a car in just a few hours. The waiters came and put the sombrero on my head and placed a bowl of fried ice cream in front of me, and then they sang “Happy Birthday” to me in Spanish. The hostess with the wine-red apron took a Polaroid picture as a souvenir. I watched the image materialize while my sister reached over to eat my ice cream with a fork. I remember thinking that I looked very young.

  The sex was fine. We parked in the parking lot of a trailhead where we’d made out a few times before. We went secretively into the backseat in case there were any cops hanging around looking for teens to bust and tried fruitlessly to fog up the windows for a little while. Ben did an award-winning job with the condom; really, he looked like he could’ve been in an instructional video for condom application. A Geo Prizm is a small car, and I kept banging my head against the roof while the sex was happening. To tell you the truth, the sex didn’t really feel like anything. It felt very similar to not having sex. I had expected it to be traumatic and emotional, but all I could think about was how much I wished my head wasn’t banging against the roof of the car.

  The sex-ed classes I’d taken in high school taught me that sex was going to be painful and awful; it wasn’t. No one had ever told me that sex could be magical or wonderful, and so I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t. Girls are not taught to feel pleasure. In her wonderful book Girls and Sex, Peggy Orenstein summarizes interviews she did with more than seventy young women on the subject of sex: “Listening to girls’ litany of disembodied early experiences, it sometimes struck me that we’d performed the psychological equivalent of a clitoridectomy on our daughters: as if we believed, somehow, that by hiding the truth from them (that sex, including oral sex and masturbation, can and should feel fabulous) they won’t find out, and so will stay ‘pure.’ ”7 My first time was bland, and I was taught to believe that that was as good as I could have expected it to be. I didn’t think twice about the fact that Ben had an orgasm and I didn’t.