Driving home the point (personal dirt style)

I never loved her.  I should make that clear up front.  It took a lot of years to realize that fact.  Sure, after she dumped me I cried so hard I nearly puked.  I wanted her back so bad that I let her string me out for a year while she periodically received her requests for wire-ordered money and (good) relationship advice about new boyfriends.  That may sound like love to some.  But those things don't necessarily add up to love.  They unquestionably add up to pathetic, but that's beside the point.  As it turned out, getting dumped by her was the best thing she ever did for me.

We'd gotten together two years earlier because we sat next to each other during junior year Trigonometry and she wanted to date me.  She admitted later that she basically flipped a coin between going after me or my friend Jeremy, who sat on the other side of her (if only Jeremy knew what he could have been in for).  She also knew my best friend, Nikki, who was nice enough to arrange the relationship for her.  Arranged relationships were nothing new or unusual for me - Corey Tolliver had run my dating life between the ages of twelve and fifteen.  Nikki thought nothing of it because I never dated anyone for very long.  This would undoubtedly be another fast (and chaste) version of love em' and leave em'.  And so we started dating - if only in the generic teenage sense of the term.

We'd been together for over two weeks and still never spent time together.  We'd never held hands, kissed or done anything else couple-ish.  I was bored out of my mind with our so-called relationship and was on the verge of dumping her.  She and I had absolutely nothing in common, and I had no reason to continue whatever it was that wasn't going on with us. 

Movie night at my place changed all that.  I, along with Jason and Robert (two of four brothers), had recently moved into the house adjacent to my parents' place.  Our grandmother had recently vacated the property in the most permanent way possible, and my folks desperately needed more space in the motherland.  So movie night occurred at a completely unsupervised bachelor pad.  Now, A Clockwork Orange is not known as being a particularly, or even slightly romantic movie.  Nor was I ever a particularly, and only rarely a slightly, romantic boyfriend.  Didn't matter.  She came at me like a fat girl attacking a fudge sundae when nobody's watching.  She was suddenly a much more interesting person.

Now let's back up for a minute.  Being a committed, if not entirely faithful, Mormon teenager, I'd made the decision to forego premarital intercourse long before the relevant equipment was in functioning order.  I'd had opportunity before with at least four other girls who openly offered, and probably could have with a few more if I'd tried.  Most of those young ladies were prettier, or at least more personally interesting to me than she was.  But yours truly did not indulge.  It was the one line in the sand that I was not willing to cross no matter how badly I was tempted.  During my teenage years I occasionally smoked, drank, and when palling around with Corey, stole everything not bolted down (and a few things that were).  But no sex.  I didn't even indulge in "personal time", if you know what I mean.  Not once - ever.  How many 17-year-old males can make that claim?

Two personal errors paved the path for my transition from criminal prude to criminal horndog.  The first explanation, more for the religious set, is that the criminal part of my lifestyle excluded the slightest possibility that I would receive any moral fortification from the Holy Ghost.  I was on my own.  The second explanation, for everyone, is that I was not psychologically prepared for a "just show up and I'll do the rest" kind of girlfriend.  My mental preparations and life experience  had only readied me for girls that would do the deed if I went after it.  Never in my wildest dreams (no I didn't even dream about that stuff) did I imagine a girl who would physically try to consummate the relationship all on her own.  That just didn't fit into my schemas for possible female behavior.  I didn't know how to say no.  Never thought it was a relevant skill.

I didn't do the dirty with her at movie night - or the next night, or even the next month.  Movie night just established a pattern for our physical interactions.  Naturally evolved physical urges combined with a girl who treated successive dates like mountaineering summit attempts - that's no way to maintain chastity.  Bad weather wasn't going to keep her off the. . . the uh . . . err . . . well, the 'peak' shall we say, forever.  

Along the way, I got to experience some really cool psychological phenomena.  Most notably, I had some pretty trippy moments of dissociation.  While in the act of acting badly, it sometimes felt quite literally like I was having an out-of-body experience - looking at myself from the outside and feeling helpless to stop the events as they played out.  This is quite common in people who find themselves violating important personal moral boundaries.  More interestingly, the phenomenon is classically seen in victims of rape and molestation, and not so much in teenagers making their first forays into potential pregnancy scares.  For the religious readers, I suppose you could say that my body was the perpetrator and my soul was the victim being traumatized.  For the nonreligious, I suppose you could say that I just wasted what should have been a wholly positive experience.

The real point of all this disclosure, however, is to get to the part where I knew for certain that I was head-over-heels in love with my girlfriend.  As already stated, I wasn't.  The relationship was purely physical.  In fact, she kind of annoyed me in most other regards.  My friends, both my inner circle and my larger circle of associates, all hated her.  After she dumped me, those opinions flowed forth like a flash flood of derision.  At first I thought they were all just trying to make me feel better.  They weren't.  They all really and truly despised her.  Ultimately, she just wasn't all that great.  But more importantly, in the common vernacular, she put out. 

Here lies the cognitive dissonance.  I was dating a girl that I didn't particularly like.  And with this girl that I didn't particularly like, I was engaging in behavior that violated a core principle of who I was.  By any reasonable standard I should have seen myself for what I was, a completely corrupted slug of person - willing to sell my values for cheap thrills.  I should have held on to that cognitive dissonance and rode it till  I changed my ways.  Indeed, my conscience was sending that signal loud and clear.  But self esteem comes with some pretty impressive defenses, namely the ability to reduce cognitive dissonance.  I couldn't keep doing what I was doing and feel good about myself under my current moral paradigm.  Either my behavior had to change, including confession and repentance, or my beliefs had to change.  In perfect textbook fashion, instead of changing my behavior, I changed my beliefs to protect my self esteem.  Since abandoning my religion altogether was a bridge too far, I chose to believe that God understood my foibles because I was in love.  I completely invented my love for her, simply to reduce my cognitive dissonance and justify my behavior.  I was so deluded that I actually proposed.  Spending my life with her would have been the ultimate proof that I wasn't behaving badly for shallow reasons.

Believing that I loved her, I changed.  The only friend willing to openly dislike her during the relationship was Nikki (in fairness, Nolan did to a much lesser extent too).  Nikki grew to absolutely despise the girl, and even moreso how much I became a different person while I was dating her.  At the time I thought it was just sour grapes that I spent less time with her.  Nope.  I changed for her, and not in a good way. 

But I had to change of course - to feed the delusion.  Because I thought I had found the truest love that had ever been in the history of love.  That didn't mean I thought I was totally A-okay with God.  I was still a morally anxious wreck; and that played a role in the relationship's end.  The only thing that made it bearable was the thought that God understood, because we were so in love that our passion could not reasonably be contained.  Over time, the moral anguish subsided - resurrected occasionally (but very intensely) by moral virtue sermons at church.  But it wasn't until the relationship was over that I actually came to my senses.

I really can't express how profound an impact that relationship had on me.  I'm generally one to accept that my strengths are derived by learning from my mistakes.  Nonetheless, I'd have a hard time turning down the chance to go back and convince my younger self to speed up the initial urge to dump her by a couple more days.  Maybe something similar would have happened anyway, with someone else.  Seems kinda inevitable in retrospect.  But at least it might have been with someone that had something to offer besides the one thing I didn't need.  It would have been nice for it to have been someone I really loved.  Even better if, unlike her, the girl actually loved me in return - instead of using me for a self esteem boost until it was time to move on.

Cognitive dissonance had me chasing that hollow dream for some of the most important years of my life.  Sometimes I want to blame "The Whore" (Nikki's assigned moniker for her) for what happened.  Honestly though, it's my life and I have to own it.  And that's why I now treat cognitive dissonance like a treasured personal warning light instead of something to get rid of.