Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage Read Online Free Page B

opportunity. Although my best girlfriend, Janelle, was the head cheerleader and I could sit anywhere I wanted to in the cafeteria, I was never invited to any parties or asked out by any football players. The guys whom I imagined I would want to have sex with didn’t even know I existed. I felt like I was waiting for the right person, right time, right something, but it wasn’t quite clear what.
    “You’ll know,” Janelle told me. “How?”
    “Trust me. You just will. You’ll know he’s really into you and won’t fuck you over.”
    “That’s what I’m looking for? Someone who won’t fuck me over?”
    “Well, that’s not the only thing. You also want it to be someone you love and trust, and who loves and trusts you and all that. But you don’t want to be the talk of the entire school the next day, do you?”
    “I don’t know. No,” I managed, though it seemed as if I was the only girl at school who hadn’t had sex yet.
    “Yeah. Once you do it, that’s fine. But you have to act like you haven’t, and like you never would, because nice girls don’t give it up until they’re married.”
    “Oh,” I said. I must have looked as confused as I sounded, because Janelle came over and started to French braid my hair—1984 girl-speak for There, there, everything’s going to be okay.

    “You have to be cool. That’s all. It’s cool to do it, but not for people to know. Except for the right people, and then they’re not supposed to know everything—otherwise, it’s not special.” I was glad she was sitting behind me, because I could not have hidden the look on my face for all the money in the world. If I had looked perplexed before, I can’t even imagine how mystified I must have seemed at that moment.
    In a way, not much has changed for me this many years later. I feel equally baffled by contradictory signals and societal messages that make no sense whatsoever. Some things never change. But I did survive growing up, as most of us invariably do, despite all those puzzling notions about looks and love and sex and relationships. And, like so many other young girls, I thought I could and would eventually fall in love with a man who would fulfill every desire I’d ever had, and that I’d never want to be with anyone else. I thought we would live out the ideal I’d been raised to believe in. If people had told me back then that someday I’d be in an open marriage, and that I would be the one who had prompted it, I would have laughed in their faces. I had every irrational reason to believe, despite the fact that I was still a virgin, that my special someone—The One—was out there. All I had to do was wait, and someday my prince would come.

    Chapter 2
    my orgasm, my self

    When she was seventeen, she lost her virginity to a guy who told her that she was responsible for her own orgasms. She set off for college feeling confident about her sexuality; she had several relationships and many lovers, and she was happy.

    during my senior year of high school,
    I finally “knew,” in exactly the way Janelle had told me I would, that I had found the guy I was prepared to lose my virginity to. Believe it or not, he was someone my mother set me up with—under the guise of helping me find a summer job.

    23

    “He’s a counselor at a boys’ camp, and his mother said the girls’ camp is looking for someone to create a theater program for them. You’d be perfect for that!” my mom gushed. I knew right away that she was up to something. She said I would be “perfect” for something only when it had nothing to do with me, and everything in the world to do with her. I agreed to meet the guy just the same. It wasn’t as if I was having any luck finding a boyfriend on my own.
    A week later, I sat watching from my bedroom window as a young guy in a Chevy Nova pulled into our driveway. Even from that vantage point, I could tell he was cute, with his pretty-boy looks and rock-star hair. He was about five foot ten,