Day 208: Relationship Dynamics | Part 3

Day 206: Relationship Dynamics | Part 1

Day 207: Relationship Dynamics | Part 2

"So for me, it was not so much a fear of a boy trying to have sex with me, lol in those days the concern was more about 'will he try and kiss me'. I remember at parties we would sometimes hear via the grapevine that a boy was kissing one of the more popular loose girls and put his hand 'down there'. This would cause the rest of us to blush and stare at her for the rest of the evening, perplexed and slightly anxious of this 'slutty behaviour' which obviously to the girl and the boys who tried to get 'their hands into her pants' was nothing more than what they did each and every weekend.  Therefore for me at that stage even, there was a wide gap between what I was willing to try and what was already a favourite pass time for the 'popular gangs'…"

I feared being alone with these boys on a date or at their house, because for some reason I was absolutely petrified of any form of intimacy. I remember the only time that I became slightly comfortable with kissing a boy was when I was the one doing the pursuing and I remember this happening once. I started developing 'feelings' for a neighbour who lived up the road who I had been friends with for many years. All of a sudden at some point this 'feeling' that I could describe as 'sensuality' started developing in my chest area and it encouraged a new 'voice' in my head - one that was gentle and encouraged me to change the way I dressed, to flirt and to try out make-up. Obviously the boy noticed that my body language around him changed because one day when I was visiting him after school as I so often did (this time wearing a slinky black dress instead of my usual shorts and tees which obviously did not go unnoticed), we were sitting on his bed chatting and he leant over and kissed me. I remember we both experimented with the 'tongue' which was totally new to me and felt very risqué!

The strange thing is that this 'reaching out' that I did to him, even though I was afraid of other boys indicated two things to me about my 'sexual development' - I avoided the boys who directed their attention to me or who were comfortable actually addressing their likes for me, because this felt unpredictable and 'dangerous'. Therefore I liked being able to asses who I could explore subtle feelings that were developing within me with - with a male friend who was gentle and 'known'. Secondly I realize that this 'first attempt at expressing an inner experience was towards a boy that was mentally unstable (not saying because he kissed me lol). He was in a special school for children with learning difficulties. I remember his father use to be very strict with him, where for example the one time I invited him to go with me on an outing to a park (we always only stayed at his house watching movies, never did anything 'outside'). He phoned his dad to ask him and the father asked to speak to me. The father explained to me things which I did not clearly understand at the time, but he said things like 'he cant stay out to long because that isn't good for him, so we can take him if we promise to have him back in 3 hours. This left me with the distinct impression that together with him being in a special school that there was something about this boy that was not entirely stable. I also remember always noting how when his parents were with him when I was at his house - the way in which they communicated with him was different to how my parents spoke to me or how any of my 'girlfriends' parents spoke to them. They were always trying to regulate his 'moods' and even at that young age (between the age of 14 - 16), I picked up that even though him and I got along fine, there was something about him that I would probably never get to see and that that there was a side to him which I did not know about. I also heard his mom sometimes speak to him in another room about him 'not getting angry' and that they have spoken about when he gets angry and that he must breathe etc… So there were many tell tale signs so to speak for me that this boy had another side to him, that he was being 'contained' and that because I only interacted with him for a few hours a week after school, that our friendship would never allow for me to 'see his other side' as his parents seemed to shield him from making mistakes around me. When we shared stories about our weekends and I would share about visiting friends he never spoke about going out to a friends house or to slumber parties/dance parties and only sometimes mentioned a friend or two from his school visiting him at his house.

So I would say that this was the first time I was drawn to a guy who had a 'darker' side to him, a side that was potentially unpredictable and had to be 'contained'. The kiss was a once off affair and I remember that we did not pursue it any further because I felt that this guy was generally withdrawn from outside factors such as friends and 'girls'. Also I felt and thought that this was not something to pursue - it was just an instinct at the time based on what I had seen and heard. Our friendship did not continue so fluently after 'the kiss' because we both felt awkward, that we had overstepped a line which for both seemed off, considering what really existed inside of us as our own 'personal issues'. I saw him less from then on, partly due to the fact that my uneasiness around 'sexuality' started surfacing in random moments of anxiety around him. I felt at the time that the childlike comfort that I always experienced around him being my 'friend' was gone and that this could mean 'the unknown' with regards to what would now happen. Nothing happened, he did not make any attempts, but we simply drifted apart ,more and a year or so later his family moved...