in the name of love

violent kissing in front of his mother. that’s what my first boyfriend and i had. smooshing, sweating, slippery and salivative slops of face-touching in the middle of the gymnasium floor. it always seemed to happen just as lonestar’s “amazed” came to its climax and my boyfriend’s mother, a french teacher at our school, made her last chaperonic round. she’d disappear for a moment, behind a smoke machine or something and feigned our make-out safety. always, always, though, i’d catch a glimpse of her salmon-pink cardigan and her notably highlighted and choppy ‘do. she’d glare at me and pass whispers to her colleagues. she’d pull my spit-covered boyfriend into her car at ten o’clock (when the dances concluded) and either talk too much or not at all. she would smile gently to me in class and would always make me feel welcome in her home. i felt, at the time, that she was a sort-of enemy. she wanted to foil my plans to win her son over with my wicked-good snogging skills! she gave me dirty looks! she was nicer to me as a student before i publicly licked her boy’s face! i was convinced that the entire rest of my LIFE rested on her; i was in love with her son, he was “the one”. she should learn to love more, too, and judge less. little did i realize how cool she was about our entire escapade into lipgloss and breath mints. she took what was in front of her, a couple of CHILDREN sucking face, and managed still smile to us both and treat us maturely enough not to rip us limb-for-limb from each other. she never once told her son to break things off with me. she never lectured me regarding our ages and our involvement. she never really made me feel uncomfortable and she never pointed out how twisted our sexual lives might end with a begininng involving parentally-witnessed heavy petting.

now, her son is one my closest friends. throughout thick self-discoveries with one another in junior high and thin levels of patience for each other in high school we learned to love each other either behind closed doors or only platonically. during our undergraduate degrees we were provinces apart and we could only know of each other through drunken phone calls at 3am and the occasional christmas break. there have been periods of time when we didn’t talk to each other much at all (mostly due to romantic involvement with our new “ones”). there have been shitty drunks and punches in the face (my bad) and there have been culinary adventures and plans made and broken and now we are lucky enough to live within five minutes of one another. he is the only male peer in my life whom i KNOW will call me from mexico or australia if a frantic message is left on his phone. a bonus, too: his mother no longer makes me worry regarding her approval. i don’t know if it’s because my eighth grade hormones have settled snugly away to
their proper cabinets or because her son and i no longer smash our faces together. point is, she's a wonderful woman and mother and i feel lucky to know her.

anyway, this young man and myself were playing a game of dice last week and we had nostalgia on the brain. over a bowl of salt and vinegar chips and plastic beer cups we took a lolling trip down the memory road and ended up asking ourselves, “how could we possibly be so stupid then?”. obviously it was impolite and probably hurtful to his mother to see us wrapped around each other so often. more notably, though, how could we have just ignored her so fully only for the sake of our sexual gratification? have our practices then affected our current romantic situations? if we had been a little more thoughtful, would we have been more aware of our future sexual and romantic selves?

we got on the topic of past and present thanks to our combined terrible romantic track records. for two people so young (we are both twenty-two), it seems ridiculous to have such a build-up of failed loves and dates. each terribly burnt and blistered once, we share a similar problem of not knowing what to do with ourselves once involved with a new partner. he seems to find himself involved with girls wanting serious, committed relationships and who are willing to do anything (even call thirty times in a row!) to make them happen. naturally, they don’t happen. i seem to find myself beginning dating adventures with wanting something fun and light, getting seriously involved somewhere in the middle and then frightening myself (or them) off so that one of us makes a speedy and messy jump to something new. this man and myself are rather exhausted from all of this up-and-down, pull-and-push, want-need-loathe cycle. we’re so, so young and have so, so much more life to get through and love and hate! how did our dating failures come to take over 50% of our days’ concern? we decided that our flip-flopping ways of the bow and arrow are likely a result of our first wades into the sea of love. remember what i said about how our public make-outs were rather rude? well, maybe those times are experiences we haven’t yet learned lessons from. perhaps we’re too quick to judge those around us as doing something to get in the way of our fun. we could be getting too caught up in the rush of a great kiss or a thoughtful gesture to really see what’s standing on the other side. we only take what is happening to us and for us at immediate value and ignore the potential spaces for karma to interrupt later. we’ll swap spit if we want to (not with each other now, clearly) and whoever doesn’t like it can SUCK IT! we’ll love as we do and we’ll be the good people we are but we’ll forget how good others can be too. we’ll share and be shared with but not fully take in the ways of which a share can be used or misused. we’ll say nice things and mean them but we’ll mean the mean things we say more. we’ll forget that we’re not the only two daters in the world who’ve been through romantic hell and hilarity and we’ll come to the conclusion that:

it was probably a good thing to give in to our tiny hearts as kids. it was likely awesome of us to learn our french-kissing skills from each other as we are now a) still great friends and b) pro kissers (i am only sort-of kidding). dealing with rumors at school might have given us a thicker skin than we wouldn’t have otherwise and having his mother watch over us was probably much safer than having her not. kissing unabashedly at thirteen now, at twenty-two, offers us a little insight and a lot of room for humbling as we shovel our ways through laughs, tears and sighs, all in the name of love. In the name of love! What more? In the name of love!