Why I Should Have Abstained from New Year’s Eve
I promised myself that’d I’d never be friends with a woman (read: girl) who ever seriously took an abstinence pledge. This promise would be especially applicable to befriending a woman approaching thirty years old who took the pledge at nine and has lived with its miserable logic for two full decades.
But I’m all about exceptions.
In fact, the one abstinence pledge I ever took was temporary and entirely related to my decision to experiment for the first time with Jagermeister. My mother was coming into town the next morning (read: I felt like trying to kill myself), and I didn’t want the stink of a stranger on me. My mother can smell sexsweat for up to two days after the event. But that pledge didn’t last. That night I had stupid sex (read: no condom) with a Korean boy I met online after we’d shared a scone at the coffee place inside Barnes and Noble. I woke up with engulfed in the fear that I’d have a halfy, Jagermeister -conceived child.
As soon as she arrived, my mother sniffed out the sex. The disdain on her face left me with no choice. I had to tell her that that I was dying. After three hours in ER, I had to ask my mother to leave the examining room so I could get a morning after pill. That cost me a forty-minute lecture from a doctor who may have been five minutes older than me, and $345 since I didn’t have insurance at the time.
But besides all that, I just don’t like the idea of anyone I would call a friend having sworn off all but marital sex. It’s up there with promising to serve your husband as you would serve Jesus in terms of my religious pledge pet peeves. But Janelle from my knitting group is so little and likable and apricot-scented that I ignore the little chastity doohickey that her dad placed around her neck in 1988 and focus on the things we have in common, like rating tennis players by their looks and hydrating our skin. These subjects make for decent frappuccino conversation, but she was the last person I wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with.
First of all, I was half certain she’s a lesbian. That would explain the abstinence so convincingly that I’ve been tempted to anonymously mail her notes assuring her that it’s ok with God and Jesus and the whole gang if she’s gay.
I’m definitely not homophobic. I’m so not homophobic that I feel like an asshole saying I’m not homophobic. I’d say I’m even slightly bi-curious. But the idea of corrupting a girl so consumed with purity makes my skin dry up like a pimple bathed in toothpaste. If I wanted to corrupt people, I would have become a Scientologist not a psychologist.
Anyway, hers was the only offer I got for New Year’s. If I turned it down, my social life would have become bank-owned. So we decided to have dinner at Applebee’s, ironically of course, followed by some karaoke.
She doesn’t really drink, of course. But the three-foot tall waiter felt bad for us—eating dinner at Applebee’s at 10PM on New Year’s Eve is even depressing to Applebee’s employees—and brought us Margaritas with our salads and two more with dinner.
Both times Janelle said, “Why not!” with an alarming abandon. How her hymen could have lasted for so long I have no idea.
“You know what your problem is,” Janelle said to me, two sips into her second Margarita.
“Please, tell me,” I said so ironically that she obviously didn’t get it.
“You’re a perfectionist.”
We’d been talking boys (read: unmarried men) and I told her that I was afraid that my vagina had taken an abstinence pledge without telling me. It was a joke and somehow I’d dragged myself into my least favorite conversation ever: The “You’re a perfectionist” conversation. Everyone loves being told that the reason they don’t do shit is because their expectations are far too high. It’s pop-pysch bullshit and the bad kind of pop-pysch bullshit because it makes us feel good about not trying.
“You’re just wrong,” I said. “I’m not afraid of things being unperfect. I’m afraid of things getting shitty. I’m afraid of shitty guys and shitty relationships and a shitty life.” Yes, I said unperfect.
“Exactly!” she said.
She was far too drunk to be properly lambasted. And choking her would have been, sadly, illegal.
While I was in the bathroom, Janelle asked the waiter to join us at Karaoke. As I was singing “You Oughta Know” to a crowd of nine two minutes before minute, she was blowing the waiter in the bar’s men’s room.
Shortly thereafter, we left. Janelle’s virginity was perfectly intact, and I was move convinced than ever that abstinence pledges are another way that society encourages insanity.
“For Some Reason It Never Feels Right” is the occasional blog of Linda Weissberg MFT.