Tags
before sex, friends with benefits, inappropriate places, masturbating, never kissed, play it safe, playing romantic games, romantic chick flicks, sexual person, super promiscuous, was fingered
Accountant living in the midwest with my husband, furbabies and son.
My family came to America when I was about six years old. I was immediately put into day care so my parents could work two jobs each to make a life for their family in the new county. I remember my first friend, Clara. She was also a child of newly arrived immigrants. We became instant friends, hanging out almost daily.
My new friend Clara’s family had a nice family room in the basement where we could sit around and watch movies undisturbed. She preferred romantic chick flicks. I didn’t. But she was the type of person who always got what she wanted.
By the time we were about eight, our games evolved from playing romantic games with dolls, to acting out romantic situations or movies with revised plots. As I said before, her favorite movies were romances. We’d play knights and princesses or some adaptation of that, always with a damsel in distress, taking turns being the boy and being the girl. The knight would save the princess, woo her, and then they would fall into bed together. And the game would continue. We would always end up semi naked, touching each other in very inappropriate places. I guess I can consider that the first time I was fingered.
We never kissed. I guess she considered that outside the scope of the game. I never even really thought about any of it. I just did what she wanted, never thinking of how culturally ‘wrong’ it was. Let me clarify something, I have always been a sexual person, even before sex was a word that meant anything to me. Some people say they’ve never masturbated. I can remember masturbating even as a small child, in some of my earliest memories. It was always in bed at night, and even then I knew it was ‘wrong’ and I tried not to let my parents catch me. Back then it wasn’t to orgasm (I didn’t even know what an orgasm was), it just felt good. So I guess it would make sense that in my child’s mind these games never seemed strange.
It got to the point that every time we hung out, which would be every weekend (as we got older our parents moved further apart from each other so soon weekends were the only times we could hang out), these were the only games we played. It was all we did. After a couple years I got tired of these games. I wanted to do something else. And as I got older I began to realize how ‘wrong’ these games were. Because Clara was used to getting her way, me telling her no didn’t go over well. After a point we started to drift apart in our friendship until we stopped hanging out altogether.
Sex has never been a huge deal to me. I know that there are women who mistake sex and love. I was never one of those people. I lost my virginity on my sixteenth birthday, much earlier than most people I know. Granted it was with someone I was dating at the time, but it was more because he wanted to and I just didn’t care enough to argue with him. It wasn’t at all that I was madly in love with him and it meant something special thing to me. There were no flowers and dim lighting. It was more like ‘this hurts like a bitch so let’s just get it over with.’
In college I had many friends with benefits. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t super promiscuous. I kept the same ‘friends’ for long stretches of time. I still preferred to play it safe and not screw too many people for fear of contracting diseases, but I never had issues with keeping just the friends with benefits status. I never wanted a relationship from someone just because we’d drunk dial each other in the middle of the night.
I often wonder if my casual stance on sex had to do with those early childhood games. To be honest I have thought of those early years a lot, especially during my more promiscuous times. They say that a person’s childhood shapes their adult years. I wonder sometimes what kind of impact it had on me. Sometimes I’m grateful for it since it made anything sexual a non-traumatic experience for me, something I was prepared for. I don’t feel mentally broken. I’m pretty happy with the person I’ve become. Would I want the same experience for my children? No. It still feels, for lack of a better word, ‘icky’. But for me it seemed to work.