This is Chapter 3 of my story about femininity, sexuality, and faith. Read Chapters 1 & 2 first.

I first noticed boys when I started high school.

For me, as a home schooler, “starting high school” meant going to a new co-op (much like a mini private school), where I took classes with other home school students.

I was a hopelessly awkward, unstylish, bumbling adolescent that freshman year, hiding behind mismatched layers and baggy flaring jeans that guarded my figure like an embarrassing secret. My long, curly hair was an unruly tyrant, and a constant source of insecurity.

I had to wear glasses to see my teachers’ whiteboards, but I didn’t like how they framed my face, so I always removed them the second I didn’t need them. I opted for blurry faces over a dip in confidence.

I didn’t make many friends at first, but that was okay. I was content to do a lot of people watching. Everyone around me was so fascinating, even if I didn’t completely understand how to enter their social circles.

Most eye-catching of all, of course, were the boys.

Waiting for a husband

It all started with an infectious thought.

“What if he’s The One?”

My reasoning went like this: I was going to get married one day, right? At some point, between now and then, I would meet a guy who would end up becoming my husband. And when I met him, I would have no idea, in that moment, that it was him.

It was such a thrilling, irrepressible idea. The world around me seemed charged with possibility and romance. Every time I met a cute boy, I couldn’t stop that question from racing through my mind.

“What if this is him? What if THIS BOY is my future husband?”

Of course, in purity culture, “future husband” meant a lot more than “man I’ll partner with one day.” It also meant, “man I’ll do The Thing with.” That is, man I’ll see naked one day. And also, man who will see me naked one day.

It was understood, in the world of modesty policing and purity rings, that there would only ever be one man with whom I’d share that kind of intimacy. Among many conservative Christian adolescents, “marriage” and “sex” were essentially interchangeable concepts, at least in our minds.

So, when a cute boy met my eyes or (gasp!) actually talked to me, and my cheeks burned as that unstoppable question rattled around in my brain, it was because there was a lot more going between my ears than images of vows and wedding dresses.

The problem

However, I had a teeny,

tiny,

minuscule,

barely even existent,

absolutely not worrisome,

problem:

It wasn’t just boys I noticed.

Every now and then, my mind would slid down forbidden, shameful paths, nudged by a physical curiosity about girls that wasn’t all too different from my curiosity about boys.

But when I had a sexual thought about a boy, it was easy enough to brush it aside, embarrassed, and casually ask God to help me keep a purer mind.

Not so with girls. If my mind veered in that direction, I quickly reined it in with a flash of deep shame and disgust. I categorized these “temptations” in the same place as passing temptations to lie or cheat or do anything else sinful.

It never occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t exactly straight. The term “bisexual” wasn’t even in my vocabulary, much less in my worldview.

As I understood it, everyone was fundamentally straight. Those who lived the “gay lifestyle” had been led astray by the devil, or else they were broken somehow because of past traumas, abuse, or dysfunctional upbringings.

But I knew that wasn’t me.

The devil was trying to tempt me and lead me astray. I wasn’t going to fall for that crap! No sir!

So I suppressed, ignored, demonized, and explained away every sign pointing to a different narrative.

Girls

Girls… confused me.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around how so many girls felt comfortable changing in front of each other, for example. How horrifying!

“We’re all girls here,” was a supposedly reassuring phrase that actually made me cringe. It didn’t matter if no boys were around. I still didn’t want my friends to see me naked or in my underwear. And I definitely didn’t want to see them underdressed.

I was too embarrassed to admit it, because it seemed I was the only one who felt this way, but sleepovers made me uncomfortable, too. If I ever shared a bed with a friend, I would remain stiffly, awkwardly at my end, careful to make sure we never touched.

The vague concept of sex would be hovering uneasily at the back of my mind the whole time, no matter how much I tried to push it away. Not that I was actively thinking about having sex with my friends. I had no idea how sex between females even worked, and it was, frankly, a thought I had never entertained.

It was just that, while other girls could innocently share a bed or snuggle or hold hands and mean nothing by it, I couldn’t… not exactly. I certainly tried. I made my best effort to be like everyone else.

But at the end of the day, “we’re all girls here” felt no different, for me, than if someone said “you’re being watched by a bunch boys”.

It was just as mortifying.

Maybe it is a crush?

I went through strange mental gymnastics to explain how I felt, while still keeping within the constrains of my evangelical worldview. Once, even before high school, I recognized how a certain girl affected me, and thought, “Huh, it’s strange how this feels exactly like a crush.”

The thought made me uncomfortable, but I just tucked it away, unable to draw the conclusion that was dangling ridiculously in front of my face.

It didn’t occur to me until more than a decade later that maybe it felt exactly like a crush because it literally was a crush. 

No one had told me that girls could crush on other girls. I hadn’t seen examples in books, movies, or culture around me to explain what I was experiencing. I wrote it off as a fluke, a rarity, something special but nameless.

Even when I felt obvious physical attraction to girls in high school, I wasn’t able to look back and connect the dots. I still wasn’t able to identify that old crush as a crush.

When beautiful girls made me self-conscious and awkward, I explained it away as jealousy, or as some sort of instinctual competitiveness among females.

When I had strong, visceral reactions to pictures of lingerie models, I explained it away as a desire to be the women in the pictures, to be sexy.

I came up with all sorts of explanations except for the one that was true.

While all this internal confusion was happening in the background, there was one boy in particular who caught my eyes that freshman year.

He didn’t know it, but he would end up changing my views on relationships for years to come.

And it wouldn’t be for the better.

Next: Read Chapter 4.