I wonder sometimes if I should feel jealous.
I keep coming across teenagers online who agonise endlessly over whether they should lose/should have lost their virginity. I keep coming across endless agonising over sexuality and attractiveness. And I remember -
I remember back when I was sixteen and starting what was then junior college (nowadays it’s been reclassified as high school). I was obese, unattractive, aware of my unattractiveness, but still full of the surging hormones one gets at that age (I am a human being, after all). There were, of course, no girls in my college (I’d never sat down with a girl in the same classroom, something I talked about in earlier blog posts). So my exposure to the female sex was...let’s say...less than ideal.
And when I met a girl, I’d have killed for an appreciative look. Just a look. Not a touch, not a kiss, and as for sex, I’d never thought beyond masturbation.
Without being falsely modest, I have above average intelligence. This helped in driving home to me just how unlikely it was that someone in my position would ever be able to get anywhere with the other sex. And it also made it cruelly clear to me that there were not too many girls around who were remotely on the same wavelength as me as far as thought processes were concerned.
Ah, but those raging hormones...
There was a girl who lived in a house not far from ours. She also studied in a college (a girls’ college, naturally) not too far from mine. These colleges were a good long way (some three kilometres’ walk) from home. Since both colleges started classes at about the same time, we both left home about the same time and naturally we found that we were walking along more or less together.
Now I knew this girl. She – and her sister – were very pretty but had, you know, nothing upstairs. Utter airheads. I knew this. Also I realised that (what with the extreme Victorian mores of the time, only two decades ago now) she and I never really had any future. If I’d tried something, even if I’d been handsome and desirable, she’d have shied away.
I knew all this. And yet I kept looking for her on my lonely walks, and felt strangely gratified when I saw her along, and enjoyed those few moments of chitchat; and I even tried to convince myself that she waited specifically for me so she could walk with me.
It’s a long, long time ago; and a lot many female eyes have slid off me as though I didn’t exist, and long before my teens ended I was inured to it. But sometimes I wish I could go back to that sad fat confused boy and comfort him and tell him a little bit of what I know. And I think back to what he was like, and I feel like weeping.
And I wonder if I should be jealous of the teenagers of today who can worry about having sex. I wonder what – in their position – I would have done.
Maybe it's better that there are no time machines after all.
I keep coming across teenagers online who agonise endlessly over whether they should lose/should have lost their virginity. I keep coming across endless agonising over sexuality and attractiveness. And I remember -
I remember back when I was sixteen and starting what was then junior college (nowadays it’s been reclassified as high school). I was obese, unattractive, aware of my unattractiveness, but still full of the surging hormones one gets at that age (I am a human being, after all). There were, of course, no girls in my college (I’d never sat down with a girl in the same classroom, something I talked about in earlier blog posts). So my exposure to the female sex was...let’s say...less than ideal.
And when I met a girl, I’d have killed for an appreciative look. Just a look. Not a touch, not a kiss, and as for sex, I’d never thought beyond masturbation.
Without being falsely modest, I have above average intelligence. This helped in driving home to me just how unlikely it was that someone in my position would ever be able to get anywhere with the other sex. And it also made it cruelly clear to me that there were not too many girls around who were remotely on the same wavelength as me as far as thought processes were concerned.
Ah, but those raging hormones...
There was a girl who lived in a house not far from ours. She also studied in a college (a girls’ college, naturally) not too far from mine. These colleges were a good long way (some three kilometres’ walk) from home. Since both colleges started classes at about the same time, we both left home about the same time and naturally we found that we were walking along more or less together.
Now I knew this girl. She – and her sister – were very pretty but had, you know, nothing upstairs. Utter airheads. I knew this. Also I realised that (what with the extreme Victorian mores of the time, only two decades ago now) she and I never really had any future. If I’d tried something, even if I’d been handsome and desirable, she’d have shied away.
I knew all this. And yet I kept looking for her on my lonely walks, and felt strangely gratified when I saw her along, and enjoyed those few moments of chitchat; and I even tried to convince myself that she waited specifically for me so she could walk with me.
It’s a long, long time ago; and a lot many female eyes have slid off me as though I didn’t exist, and long before my teens ended I was inured to it. But sometimes I wish I could go back to that sad fat confused boy and comfort him and tell him a little bit of what I know. And I think back to what he was like, and I feel like weeping.
And I wonder if I should be jealous of the teenagers of today who can worry about having sex. I wonder what – in their position – I would have done.
Maybe it's better that there are no time machines after all.
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