Is Our Facebook Romance Real?
By Teri L. Waine. Posted on .
When it came to me unearthering my own life with him, there was one glaring omission—the pregnancy. I didn't even consider telling him. Jeff would never be able to understand the maddening and contradictory rules I was expected to follow and the judgment I experienced as a teenage girl in the rural South. If I tried to explain he'd probably tell me to just 'f*ck what people think.' He cannot understand what it was like to get morning sickness before school, nor what it is like to have your insides vacuumed out by an old, lecherous-looking doctor.
He will never know what it was like to be consumed with anxiety that I was one secret away from being rejected by everyone from my pastor and my grandmother to my best friends. The way I see it, I was given the chance to continue being accepted and loved because of that abortion, to go to college and have a life, and that is not something that I will ever regret or even offer up for discussion.
But by reconnecting with Jeff and remembering our time together so many years ago (I'm 28), I have been able to dust off and put on the mantel the goodness and normality of my first sexual experiences. I now believe that I made the decisions I did because I simply wanted to be touched, loved, and gotten off. And if I'd grown up somewhere where women who have sex aren't treated like lepers, I might have been on a friendlier terms with condoms.
After about three months of writing to Jeff, the thrill of reconnecting started to wear off. Our exchanges trickled down to a message here or there, and our plans to cut across California in an RV fell by the wayside. Then I started dating someone and I no longer needed to rehash distant memories of someone desiring me. I told Jeff that I met someone, and since then his messages have been little more than frigid, one-line responses. I guess he was really serious about that RV trip. I would feel bad for him, but I'm still getting over the ride I went on after the last time the two of us got together.
*Names have been changed.
