God Bless This Mess(33)
Well, guess who was sitting in my freshman math class at UA on the very first day?
One look at Brady, and all those old feelings came rushing right back.
I told Luke about it, and he warned me not to go backward. “If you do, I’ll be disappointed in you. You’re better than that,” he said.
I knew he was right, but Brady started texting me, and he just had me wrapped around his finger.
I distanced myself from Luke. Things just fizzled out between us. I can see looking back on it now that it was a huge mistake. I let go of a really good guy just to fall back into the same old bad relationship.
Brady and I slowly but surely got back together. I tried to put everything behind me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d done. I still wondered why he felt the need to go back to his old girlfriend when we had seemed so happy together, so good together, and the only thing I could come up with was the sex.
Did I need to start having sex with him? I wondered. Was that what was missing?
It’s ridiculous, right? Looking back on it, I can see that I basically blamed a part of myself for his cheating, and then tried to make it right by pushing beyond my own boundaries. (Girls: Don’t do this!)
When you’re looking to other people for validation, the problem is, you’ll be willing to bend your boundaries or break right through them to win them over. And the thing I’m slowly coming to realize now is that the more I establish boundaries, the better off I’m going to be.
But that isn’t what I felt then.
I loved Brady. He said he loved me. I wanted him back, and I wanted him to stay.
At the time, it felt right.
A lot of people say their first time was terrible, or at the very least awkward, because they didn’t know what they were doing. That wasn’t us. We knew each other. We’d built up our desire for each other for a long time, and gotten to know each other from all those nights making out in the back seat. Our first time was two people who loved each other, and it was so sweet, and so pure, and even though it was sex out of marriage, it felt safe to me.
I’m a physical person. I’m touchy-feely. I love a good make-out session. But I don’t want that to be all a relationship is. I’m not interested in sex without emotional connection. I’m not a prude at all, I’m just emotionally driven for physical desire—and my emotional connection to Brady was huge.
Our first time was the way you think it’s supposed to be, which I think is really rare for a first time.
At the same time, a part of me regretted doing it, because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I was conflicted again, this time in an internal struggle of shame. What I did was bad, I thought, but I’m not bad, and he loves me, and it felt right.
At UA, while experiencing the freedom of living on our own, away from our parents for the first time, Brady and I kept having sex. A lot of sex. For about six months, and then I freaked out. It stopped feeling special. It almost just became something we did. It became a cycle. I mean, you can’t have cake every day without feeling sick or guilty, right?
On Valentine’s Day he bought me lingerie, and I was kind of like, “Oh. Okay.”
It felt like he was looking at me as more of an object; looking at the lovemaking we shared as something more physical/sexual than the emotional/loving act I thought it was in the beginning. I also think the more we kept doing it, the more I kept internalizing my shame over having sex in the first place.
We started making out, and I stopped and said, “I can’t do this anymore. This is not me. I love you. But . . . ,” and I explained to him what I was feeling.
He said he understood. He said it was okay. But there was resentment from him. I could feel it. When we’d start making out after that, he would say, “You’re teasing me.” I wasn’t trying to tease him. I was drawing a line in the sand—but we had already crossed that line, and that made it really hard to go back.
I kept pushing my limits, questioning, How close can we get to that line before I feel bad about it?
I also still carried the resentment of him cheating on me. Could I really trust him after that? The trust I felt wasn’t automatic anymore. And I didn’t know how to deal with that.
The two of us stayed together all the way through the end of our junior year. We didn’t date other people. Everyone assumed we were on our way to getting engaged. The assumption was that we would get married sometime after college. That’s just what people do from our neck of the woods, so I kind of assumed that’s what we would do: take the next step. Especially since we loved each other as much as we did, and we’d been together for so long and gone through so much together.
By that, I mean Brady was there for me through some really dark days.
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Our relationship happened over the same period of time during which I stopped having success in the big pageants I entered. We stayed together as I went through the worst of my weight and fitness struggles. But it was more than that.
When I got to college, which was just a fifteen-minute drive from my parents’ house, I realized I didn’t stand out anymore. High school had been challenging, but at least I had my pageant successes to let me know I was valued. UA was different. It seemed like there were two thousand other girls as high-achieving as I was. For a person who was always looking outside herself for validation and approval, that was really hard. I didn’t feel special anymore.